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--- John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com> wrote:
> >>In practical terms, has anyone tried to encourage
> >>experimentation by users in user docs? How do you
> >>approach error recovery?
>
> Huh?
>
> My application cost my company about 18 million
> dollars and is charged over
> 200,000.00 per year for support. This is not a toy.
> If you experiment and
> make an error, up to 10,000 error messages could be
> generated on an hourly
> basis until fixed. The nearest anyone gets to
> experimentation is to become a
> developer, and developers are not users.
Clearly, your application falls into the category of
needing to discourage the users from experimentation,
in much the same way that nuclear plant workers would
be discouraged from experimentation (if a little less
dramatically). I was referring more to consumer-level
software products, if that wasn't clear.
I don't recall what application you are working on
now. However, many very expensive CRM and ERP systems
are never adopted by the user base, precisely because
people are too afraid and intimidated to actually use
them. The implementations, costing tens of millions,
are failures. Maybe one solution in these instances is
to have a test system that users can experiment with
in order to become popular with the system.
Lois Patterson
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