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Subject:Re: Total Waste of Time From:Dan Brinegar <vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 21 Dec 1999 13:26:40 -0700 (MST)
At 9:14 AM -0800 12/21/99, Andrew Plato wrote:
>examples of
>useless audience analysis. I got one.
>
>This debate about what to call ToolTips.
>
>NOBODY CARES what you call these damn things. Jeez. This is exactly the kind
>of completely trivial nonsense that too many writers obsess over.
With my uncanny ability to kill off a thread, I'll offer the observation
that this sorta thing has almost nothing to do with audience analysis as I
was advocating....
Assuming this was a problem (it's not) my solution woulda been to go out to
the shop floor/techsupport pit/smoking area and ask a user... astrologer,
mechanic or economist: they either use it or they don't. Real quick, done,
make popcorn, write.
It's those times when ya don't have users, available SMEs, time, or working
software that I start to worry ;-D
"blah blah blah, Mr Writer -- that's not what it's called in CamelCaps98!!!"
"I'm sorry, Sir, the first page of the manual notes in BIG RED LETTERS that
this product is not compatible with CamelCaps98... "
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Brinegar Information Developer/Research Droid
"Leveraging Institutional Memory through Contextual
Digital Asymptotic Approximations of Application Processes
suited to utilization by Information-Constrained,
Self-Actualizing Non-Technologists."
vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com CCDB Vr2Link http://www.vr2link.com Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.