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It has been said that any technology developed after you're a teenager seems
mysterious. If that were literally true I'd still have an eight-track tape
player, but I digress 8^) Dick Margulis <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>
hypothesizes that some users never seem to get the hang of certain GUI
techniques because of right-brain dominance. I propose a different
hypothesis: the differences are age-related. Those of us who learned
computers before GUIs may have a different preferred style of interaction.
My hypothesis should be easy to test for some eager grad student: Map
preferred styles of interaction against when the subject learned to use
computers and see if a pattern emerges that correlates to age. I predict it
would. (To test Dick's hypothesis, the grad student would need to add a psych
profiler.)
The implication for either DIck's hypothesis or mine is that the way we
document procedures in user's guides is not necessarily helpful to all users.
I generally see mouse-and menu-oriented steps in third-party applications.
You really have to pick one method of interaction and stick with it in
documentation, because the alternative ("Select File>Print, or enter Alt-F
Alt-P, or click the Print icon, or drag the file to the printer icon on your
desktop") would render both reader and writer insane within a few pages. I
suppose this problem might be solved with an XML application, with multiple
parallel paths for all procedures. Maybe the exact way in which you ask for
online help will silently define the path you're sent onto...
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