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Re: The coming predominance of user experience and technical communications
Subject:Re: The coming predominance of user experience and technical communications From:Chris Borokowski <athloi -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:Richard Lewis <tech44writer -at- yahoo -dot- com>, techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 24 Jul 2007 09:44:43 -0700 (PDT)
I agree that Hackos was onto a good concept when she talked about
user-driven understanding of interface and documentation. I can't
imagine another way to do it, unless one is writing about a basic
technology for a technologically literate audience.
The grocery autocheckouts are improving here, but there are still
interface boo-boos. For one, at the Kroger here, they keep the volume
at blasting level, so the machine barks "SCAN NEXT ITEM" and you jump
out of your skin. They finally have SKU bins designed well, so you can
click through sensible menus (Fruits/Veg -> tomato-type things ->
tomatillo) and get to the product.
--- Richard Lewis <tech44writer -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> I went grocery shopping last night and I flat out told the store
> manager that I refuse to learn the interface of their
> You-Do-The-Scanning system. If I have to learn yet another terrible
> interface, I am going to throw up all over the place. I mean, I have
> to select the "Bakery" icon to tell the darn thing that I am next
> going to scan a vegetable.
>
> When I politely pointed this out to them, I was told something like
> "You gotta understand that the SKU's of many of our vegitable items
> are in the same bin category as are our bakery items." I should have
> told them, but did not, that I was there to buy some tomatoes - not
> to learn the internals of how their store works.
>
> What can change this insanity? Hackos has it right about focusing
> on the end-users goals and the tasks they use to accomplish their
> goals. ( However, what she did not write about was that, especially
> for larger scale systems, in order to come up with a comprehensive,
> integrated understanding of goals and tasks, one needs to rigorously
> identify the interrelationships between them. The interrelationships
> are the litmus test of the degree of rigor that goal and task
> analysis has been performed.)
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