New Year's Resolutions - from David Pogue, NY Times

["Marguerite Krupp" <mkrupp -at- cisco -dot- com>]

Hi Folks,

Back on the list after a holiday hiatus - Not a vacation, but a few days
away from email. I found two interesting New Year's Resolutions in David
Pogue's "Circuits" column in today's New York Times:

1. We will revisit the elimination of printed manuals.

Yes, of course, everyone's doing it -- everyone's exiling the
user guides to an on-screen electronic Help menu. But at what
cost? Most consumers absolutely despise electronic help
screens; a printed user guide is infinitely better. I'll bet
that what few nickels companies save by not creating decent
manuals are more than offset by the increase in calls to
technical help hotlines. (Full disclosure: I publish a line
of books called the Missing Manual series. But I'd love to be
put out of business by a return to the days of excellent free
manuals.)

...

3. We'll learn English as a second language.

If worker bees in the electronics industry deem it necessary
to puff up the language with meaningless buzzwords, so be it:
"price point" for price, "form factor" for shape, "user
experience" for quality, "functionality" for feature,
"utilize" for use and so on. But once they start trying to
foist this silly dialect on the rest of us -- in dialog
boxes, press releases and online help -- they've gone too
far. Going forward, I'd like to incentivize them to implement
a value proposition: Positively impacting the user experience
through empowering plain English.

You can read the whole column, at least for this week, at:
http://www.nytimes.com/circuits?8cir

Hope we all have a better, more prosperous year in 2003!

Marguerite


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