At 4:13 PM +0200 4/27/10, Peter Lind wrote:
If only the world consisted of smart users ... I think, however, that
we're generally closer to the opposite. And no, I don't hate users -
I've just seen too many people do things that were very far removed
from "smart".
Regards
Peter
Peter et al:
Smart is a relative term. I have one account where the majority of
users are PhD's -- and they indeed have the "smarts" and the
sheepskins to prove it.
You would be surprised as to how many of those forget their logons
and insist that they did not enter their logons as they were
recorded. For example, I had one user (i.e., fictitious Mary Smith)
who said that "marysmith" was not her logon because she always uses
"msmith" for all her logons -- but that was what was recorded in the
database.
I tried to explain to her that the database doesn't make this stuff
up, for example how would the script know to use "marysmith" for her
logon if she had not provided it? But somehow it was the script's
fault for not knowing she always uses "msmith". Keep in mind these
are people with PhD's. I have many other stories.
As I see it, one of the problems we face as developers is confronting
user's egos. They have an image of themselves and our scripts can
threaten that image by making them feel ignorant. We have to deal
with that in a way that informs them, but doesn't demean them in any
fashion.
Here's a real world example -- over 20 years ago a company made an
electronic hand-held chess game.
While the game was successful, the company received a considerable
amount of repairs, way over what they had expected. They wanted to
find out why and after an investigation they found that their
software made the computer's chess-moves TOO quickly. So, they place
a time delay into the software so that it would "look" to the user
like the computer was thinking about its moves. That time-delay
solved the problem.
Apparently, some end-users got pissed when they thought the computer
could so easily beat them. But, if the computer took more time to
beat them, then that was more acceptable and the end-users were less
inclined to throw the game into a wall.
So with respect to software engineering, how users view what's going
on is important.
Cheers,
tedd
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