🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <15...@csli.Stanford.EDU> po...@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
>Stories about users who put their diskettes in the dishwasher etc.
>are amusing, but in most such cases these people don't really come
>out stupid if we take into account their lack of computer background.
>It may be obvious to us that a "clean" disk is one with no data on it,
>but there is no reason why someone with no computing background should
>even think of this interpretation, much less be sure that it is the
>appropriate one.

This is inappropriate gallantry on behalf of what is, in fact, a
percentage of truly STUPID users.

Let's look at it another way.  Do **any** stupid computer users exist?
Yes or no?  There are stupid people in every other walk of life -- are
computers magically exempt?  No?  Okay, then some fraction of genuinely
stupid users exists.  Is it a huge fraction?  Naw, we're not that
uncharitable.  It's just a SMALL fraction of truly stupid users.

Now, what fraction of users, overall, have actually put a diskette into
the washing machine to try and get a 'clean' disk.  Is it a huge
fraction?  No -- it's just a SMALL fraction.

So, was it the SAME fraction as our stupid users mentioned above?  If
not, then it was smart users who put the diskettes into the washing
machine.  The stupid users must have done something else.  What did they
do -- put the diskettes into floppy drives and use the FORMAT command?
If so, why are they the stupid users while the Maytag people get to be
called smart users?  What does it take?

>Now some error messages are confusing, but when a program complains
>that it can't find the file that it has been told to read, you'd think
>that the user would suspect that something is wrong and see if he had
>mis-typed the name or if the file was in fact present, not just
>blithely proceed.

On the serious side for a moment -- I think the primary reason users
ignore error messages is that there are too many spurious ones.  From
the moment an end-user powers on the PC, he or she is bombarded with
irrelevant diagnostics and false-alarm warnings in computerese, most or
all of which the departmental 'guru' will, if asked, say 'just to
ignore'.  Within the application itself, there will usually be several
confusing messages pop up per session that sound like errors but which
in fact aren't -- or aren't serious enough to matter.  

Most of us who have shepherded a new sec'y through the company mailing
list setup, or gone over to the neighbor's house to rescue someone
trying to get a term paper to print, have had to tell them "oh, never
mind that" or "oh, that just means you don't have a second parallel port
attached, ignore it," or "that's ok, you always get that with an empty
file, let's continue."  It usually makes sense to US in an ad-hoc way,
but what's happening with the user is that the reliable cause-and-effect
relationship between and error message and REAL trouble is being
demolished.

If all users were programmers, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.
There is a species of computer ingenuity -- an intuition built on an
almost subliminal recognition of underlying patterns -- which
programming and other forms of unstructured computer play can build.
The end-user, locked into the gilded cage of a "well-designed"
application, never develops this intuition.  It's not supposed to be
necessary that they do.  Unfortunately, when we get into the realm of
"system-y" error messages and such, we pass out of the gilded cage and
into the chaotic junkyard programmers prefer to mess around in.  The
user doesn't have the intuition necessary to navigate this junkyard, and
gets lost in it.
-- 
What luck for rulers that men   []+   Tom Neff
do not think. -- A. Hitler      +[]   tn...@bfmny0.BFM.COM