Re: Interacting with a touch screen

[Janice Gelb <Janice -dot- Gelb -at- Sun -dot- COM>]

On 31/12/08 04:11 AM, Jim Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 09:04, Sharon Burton <sharon -at- anthrobytes -dot- com> wrote:
> 
>> [snip]
>>
>> (I remember the QA reviewer who had a thing about the word "must". She
>> wouldn't certify a document accurate until every "must" was removed. She
>> didn't like ordering people, she said. So we couldn't tell the users that
>> they must type their username and password to login to the system. She
>> wanted us to say they "should". As tho there were options here. sigh)
>>
> A motivational speaker I once saw encouraged us to replace "must," with
> "need to," when dealing with others.  His reasoning was that people are more
> amendable to doing something if they think they need to do it, rather than
> if they think they must do it.
> 
> I've somehow kept that in the back of my mind for my personal interactions,
> but I don't have any problems with using, "must," when writing
> documentation.
> 

If an action is something that has to be completed in
order for a task to be successful then the word "must"
is appropriate and should be used, imho. The term "need
to" does not carry the same weight as "must." As for
"ordering people around," the job of the documentation
is to provide instructions for the user so that seems
really odd reasoning!

-- Janice

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Janice Gelb          | The only connection Sun has with
janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com  | this message is the return address


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