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Ok...I got ahead of myself...let me see if I can do what I'm paid
for...write clear information.
The discipline for knowing how to write User Interfaces that are
"intuitive" is becoming known as Interaction Design (ID).
The theory behind ID is that through observation, you identify a
small class of users and what they do...maybe three users who are the
vast majority of your application's user-base, and you create
personas..give them real names, biographies, even pictures of what
they look like. Let's call them Mary, William, and Ruth. Mary is your
user, William is your system administrator, and Ruth is your network
administrator
You now write your application and your documentation for
them...nobody else. Every feature you want to add to the application,
you ask yourself "What is Mary's/William's/Ruth's goal, do they do
this to achieve their goal, and if so, how do they do it?"
If they don't do it, but someone else may do it 1 out of a 100 times,
it becomes an edge case and if addressed, only VERY superficially.
It is a real problem when marketing gets involved because they want
the application to work for any persona that MAY come along at any
time because the yet-to-be-identified persona may be a sale because
only they do something and if it had it, they would buy it. That's
why these personas must become, in your mind, real people. We have a
set of personas that we've added to our employee list, they are in
the employee directory, they have email addresses and their pictures
are framed on the wall. Intrnally, in our conversations, we don't say
"The user does this..". We say "Mary does this..."
> Sorry John, you've lost me. Seems you've just talked in a circle
> and not
> addressed my point or made a new one.
>
> Nobody said anything about documenting stuff that's not in the UI.
> Where'd
> that come from? And what's with goals?
>
> As far as marketing... Well, if you're going to add a function like
> text blur just to add to the number of new features (marketing),
> it's got to be
> in the UI somewhere. And if it's in the UI it's got to be
> documented
> somewhere (if only a brief addition in the task of formatting
> characters).
> And that feature may only be targeting a tiny fraction of the user
> base, but fulfils a niche that marketing and sales want to fill.
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