Re: Rumors of FrameMaker's Death are Untrue, says Adobe

[Todd Sieling <tsieling -at- DIRECT -dot- CA>]

I have to second Mr. Barefoot's points on the intuitiveness of Word over
Frame. I would like to add another, more generalized way in which Word is
far more approachable by an outsider: the simple fact that you can move
table borders, graphics, words, sentences and paragraphs by clicking and
dragging (or dragging and dropping if you prefer a more rugged way of
putting it). Using the mouse to redefine the positions and sizes of various
objects compared with the tedium of mucking about in a dialog box with
numeric measurements is, I think, a good example of how software can in fact
be intuitive.

Todd Sieling
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Technical Writers List; for all Technical Communication issues
> [mailto:TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU]On Behalf Of Darren Barefoot
> Sent: Friday, May 21, 1999 12:30 PM
> To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject: Re: Rumors of FrameMaker's Death are Untrue, says Adobe
>
>
> Without opening up the beastly Word/Frame debate, here's my two cents on
> intuitiveness:
>
> Intuition: a. The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of
> rational processes; immediate cognition.
>
> Denigrating familiarity in software design is, I think,
> ill-advised. MS Word
> is intuitive, and more intuitive than FrameMaker, because it adheres to
> Microsoft's standards for interfaces. If I've used Access, or
> Front Page or
> any other (ubiquitous) Microsoft product, I intuitively
> understand how Word
> operates. The very commonness of Microsoft's products makes them familiar
> and thus intuitive. The icons, menus, ToolTips, online Help etc. are
> generally consistent. The same can't be said for FrameMaker or any of the
> Adobe products--each product has a different look, and, for example,
> FrameMaker's help system is, to be gentle, irritatingly unique. Word's
> dialog boxes are, simply put, better designed. Compare the Preferences
> dialog box in Frame with the Options dialog box in Word. Which is
> easier to
> use? Which provides more functionality?
>
> Let's be honest. If you took somebody who'd never used a computer
> before and
> offered them these two products, which one would they find easier to use?
>
> I will admit that FrameMaker has certain advantages over MS Word.
> Intuitiveness is not one of them. DB.
>


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