How long should an onscreen message last?

["Chris Knight" <cknight -at- attcanada -dot- ca>]

Thanks to Gene Kim-Eng, Kathleen Gresham, and Dick Margulis (who CCd me -- I
haven't seen the digest yet) for their suggestions:
Differentiating among the messages (Kathleen's idea) seems wise, and
probably doable.
Making the message appear in a pop-up instead of the message line (Dick's
idea) is probably not on, but I'm going to see if I can get the message to
flash, or (Gene's idea) have a sound as well as the text. Development is
supposed to be adding the ability to play WAV files fairly soon. We planned
on using this for help. Right now there is none, and since it is totally
unpredictable who the users are, there is no way to disseminate a "user
guide" -- the panel software has to be usable by anyone who can walk up to
an apartment building (i.e. *anyone*) without documents or training.
Interesting, what?

There is no user guide for the product, but there is an Installation,
Configuration and Administration Guide in the works (me).
Up until now I have pretty much ignored the panel messages, because mostly
they weren't helpful or even oriented to the users; they seemed to be more
for letting the developers (and customer support) know what's going on.
But seeing the problem of how long to make the message persist has caused me
to pay more attention to these messages.
Of course, *paying* attention is one thing, *getting* attention for
usability improvements is another.

Chris
_____________________________________
Christopher Knight, Technical Communication Architect
http://members.attcanada.ca/~cknight/
E-mail: cknight -at- attcanada -dot- ca
Phone: 604 877 0074
_____________________________________
"Laughter is the representative of tragedy, when tragedy is away."
Wyndham Lewis



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