RE: Disadvantages of angle brackets?

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher5 -at- cox -dot- net>]

I completely disagree.

One of the most frequent complaints I hear from neophyte software users is
that there's too much to read. Users get lost in a sea of extraneous words
and can't find the important keys burried in the text. And frequently, the
complaint is that there's so much attention paid to the "point here, click
this" instructions that the concepts the user really needs to learn are
obfuscated.

Please remember that New User != (does not equal) Stupid User. If you use
the angle bracket technique, you cut down on the number of words the user
needs to read and let the important information - how to get to the feature
they want - stand out.

My two cents.
-Sue Gallagher

> -----Original Message-----
> Geoff Hart said:
> Angle brackets are inherently unintuitive, and replacing them with
> actual arrow characters is no more obvious: With angle brackets, the
> reader requires two leaps of logic (angle to arrow, arrow to menu
> opening) to associate this style with the use of menus.
>
<snip>
> The conservative approach is to write out everything, as you have done
> in your second option. It pays to remember that while this may
> hypothetically take your power user a bit longer to read (2-3 seconds
> per procedure?) compared with using arrows, these people are consulting
> the documentation rarely,...
>
> In contrast, the general or neophyte user who will be consulting the
> documentation frequently suffers from a significant penalty if you use
> the arrows: if they fail to understand this convention, they fail to
> understand your instructions, and probably won't come back to your
> documentation again. For them, imposing a penalty of a few seconds is a
> non-issue: ...
<snip>


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