Hello Maurice, Tuesday, December 23, 2003, 8:35:46 PM, you wrote:
MS> I will probably never cease to be amazed by the apparently MS> omnipresent expectation that all software must be either self MS> evident or otherwise self explanatory. It's primarily an internal IT industry expectation - take a person who's never seen a PC before, and they're just as likely to be perplexed or scared by the experience. But those in the industry can usually barely remember when they were in that situation, so it just doesn't enter our thoughts. However, once people have a little knowledge, they feel that they should be able to expand this knowledge quickly. So everything must be very visible. (I'll come back to this later.) Ironically, the one attempt to MAKE functionality visible - the Office Assistant in Microsoft Office - is almost universally despised because it's interruptive. So they're replacing such technologies with pop-up tooltips - witness the Windows XP "I've hidden your System Tray Icons" notifications - which tend to annoy just as many people. MS> In most every profession where some kind of tool is used, it is MS> accepted that initially people need to learn how to use the tool MS> unless such use is trivial. Agreed. Training is paramount - without it, people are just working with assumptions and habits. Companies that depend on uninformed assumptions and habits tend to spend a lot of time trying to recover data, in my experience. MS> Business e-mail is, in my opinion, not a trivial tool. Just like MS> business correspondence is not a trivial tool in doing business. I've MS> heard of secretaries who are required to follow a course in official MS> Dutch correspondence which is an evening course of several hours per MS> week for a duration of 39 weeks. For email, the basics for any package can be covered in a morning. A more advanced course can take a day. That gives everything you need for "business use" - you don't need to delve into the deeply technical for such a thing. A company I worked for did such courses, and had far fewer complaints from customers that had taken the training option than from those that hadn't. MS> So, can someone explain why it is that a company pays money to have a MS> secretary learn correspondence, but expects that same secretary to be MS> able to properly use e-mail without any instruction or guidance? Or is MS> it just that nobody cares. It's an assumption. In my work life, I work with Lotus Notes and Domino. It's a very flexible, powerful product. Yet many customers slate it because it's not like Outlook. They're familiar with Outlook. They want Outlook, because they THINK they know it. Take an untrained person, and they'll tell you Outlook is better. Put them through the training, and then ask them how to do what they've just learnt in Outlook. They're stumped. They have a basic familiarity with "email" that comes from Outlook. Therefore, they believe that the Outlook methods and interface are the best, most productive ways. I don't believe anyone on this mailing list would particularly agree with that - and I don't believe that Outlook is a better email client than The Bat! for most types of uses. (Let's not get into an argument on whether Notes is better. Let's just say that if Notes only did email, it would make things simpler - but then, it would also make Notes just another email client. *grins*) Returning to what I said earlier about a little knowledge... The problem is that with a little knowledge, people expect further knowledge gain to be incrementally easier each time - because there's a "sweet spot" between not knowing anything and knowing that little where the knowledge is gained very rapidly. When trying to get even more knowledge, the amount of effort required tends to increase - any student can verify this for you! As always, cost tends to annoy us - whether it's financial or time. It's not a battle any developer of any software package can win. :-( -- Best regards, Philip mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.02 CE on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4
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