[TriLUG] User Friendliness

[Turnpike Man]

--- "Timothy A. Chagnon" <tchagnon at futeki.net> wrote:
> I applaud your effort. Here's my $0.02.
> 
> On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 01:00, Jeff Tickle wrote:
> > Because if there's one
> > thing Microsoft got right, it's making a computer easy to use...
> 
> I disagree with you here.  I think Microsoft has done much harm by
> making things "user friendly."  They have essentially lowered the bar
> _so_ far in this respect that users don't learn anything about what's
> really going on in the background.  Plus, doing anything slightly more
> advanced takes that many more steps to get past the user friendliness.

I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with your disagreement... ;)  Users
really don't need to know what's going on in the background.  A computer is a
tool.  A tool is something simple that anyone can pick up and use and
accomplish a task in the best and easiest way possible.  Take a hammer for
instance.  You pick up a hammer, you beat a nail into 2 pieces of wood to put
them together.  That's ALL you need to know about the hammer.  You don't need
to know where its weight is balanced, you don't need to know how heavy the head
is or what kind of wood the handle is made of, or what kind of alloy for that
matter.  You can also see that the back of the head has a use too, pretty
obvious, helps you take your nail back out.  Did I have to know all that other
stuff to know that?  Not at all.

I could make another analogy of users on a network neededing to know what us
network/system admins do.  Think they should understand TCP/IP before using
their computer on the Internet?  Hell I've been doing this for 8 years and I
still don't give a damn what the packet looks like.  Should we teach them that
stuff too?

my fun $0.02 !
David M.

> 
> <bad_analogy_pun>
> Teach a man to cat and he'll cat for a day.  Teach a man to man and
> he'll man for the rest of his life.
> </bad_analogy_pun>
> 



	
		
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