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Subject:Re: When is it too much information? From:reshma pendse <reshma_pendse -at- yahoo -dot- co -dot- in> To:yehoshua paul <ysp10182 -at- gmail -dot- com>, Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca> Date:Tue, 19 Feb 2013 01:33:56 +0800 (SGT)
I wish I had more reviewers like your support colleague!
You said that you have described the interface change in the Release Notes. Would it help to rephrase your description of this change in such a way that it accommodates what this extra sentence would be trying to tell your users? Is the description placed under What's New or as an Enhancement/Revision? Could you place it under a heading that immediately makes it clear that no user action is necessary?
My $0.02.
regards,
Reshma
________________________________
From: yehoshua paul <ysp10182 -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca>
Cc: tech2wr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Monday, 18 February 2013 10:23 PM
Subject: Re: When is it too much information?
What changed was the one of the fields. Because users were confused by it,
the field was removed. If users want to view the information, they can
access it from somewhere else in the system, which is what I explained.
I described the interface change in the release notes. It just seems
superfluous to me to write an additional line in the description saying
that users' don't need to/shouldn't try and change anything.
That said, I do accept the argument that the support guy probably knows the
target audience best seeing as he deals with our customers on a daily
basis, and as he said it's just one line.
I was actually pretty impressed with him. The release notes went out for
review, and he responded immediately with feedback.
Yehoshua
On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 6:40 PM, Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca> wrote:
> Hi Yehoshua,
>
> I would consider the "homework analogy". I ask my kids to write the name
> of each course they have and on the specific day of the week, write the
> assignments and their due dates. If they were not assigned anything, they
> can write "none assigned". I expect to see "study for test in Thu"
> sometimes.
>
> This means that if a user sees something questionable on the screen, then
> maybe an affirmation to accept the default settings would be appropriate.
> Or if the interface are vastly different from the previous, a special note
> to existing users of prior versions would be helpful.
>
> -Tony
>
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