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Bill wrote:
> Someone needed to know how to create a hyperlink
> (given their definition of hyperlink was different
> than the product's). Now, someone else's definition
> of "hyperlink" may still be different. Who's right?
The user is always right. :)
> In this case, I argue that the product is
> right. . . . <snip> I think in the "hyperlink" example,
> a glossary definition of "hyperlink" would have been
> nice, this way the reader looks up "hyperlink" in the
> index, or maybe directly in the glossary, and then
> understands what "hyperlink" means to this
> application, and *then* how to create them.
Ah, but the thing is, the user wouldn't know to look hyperlink up in the
glossary unless they already knew the product defined it differently from
their own conception of the term. And if the user is going through the docs
and not finding the information they need, their first thought will not be
"I must be misunderstanding how Adobe conceptualizes hyperlinks"--it will
be "This manual is a worthless piece of junk!" (Or something along those
lines...)
The software exists to serve the user, not the other way around. If most
users think a hyperlink is something that takes you from one location to
another, the software should accommodate that idea--if not in the actual
interface design (ideally), then at least in the documentation. Someone at
Adobe could have thought, "Okay, say a user's making a hyperlink. What are
they probably doing? One in a hundred might be linking to embedded
multimedia, but most of the time they're just linking to a different
location within the document.So we'll write a procedure for that exact
scenario and make it impossible to miss it in the documentation."
But then we would have missed out on this fun discussion. ;)
Christine
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