While we are on this topic, I can tell you that USER behaves like, looks like, and IS a 4-letter word that is destined to be spoken with the same force of vehemence as many other, less polite, 4-letter words that you might know. But users pay the bills so... gotta live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Seriously, users will put your software through the best stress tests in the world because of something called designer's hypnosis. You write code to be used by users who probably don't have the years of experience that you have. Why would you expect them to be able to manipulate your elegant product with grace, elan, and aplomb?
All you have to do to appreciate this problem is to watch a few episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies" to see what I mean. People inexperienced with technology have no idea how to correctly use it. What is intuitive to you is an enigma to them because they don't have your background. And that is where the "hypnosis" comes in. You have done things the "right" way so many years that you forget the time when YOU didn't have a clue either. You ALWAYS do something in a particular way so long that you forget you had to be taught how to do that.
It is a problem common to writers in any field. You write something that you think will be the magnum opus of your company's publications. Then, just to be thorough, you go through the document a second time to catch typos. After a couple of passes, it looks GREAT. Then you turn it over to the "official" proof-readers and it comes back festooned with red ink. There you are, aghast at what happened. But what REALLY happened is that your mind remembers what you intended to see and it automatically overlays what you meant to write, hiding what you actually wrote. We have to remember that our brain filters out stuff on-the-fly as a survival technique. We have a "spell-checker/auto-correct" in our brain when we read. Have you ever cursed that foul creation of Satan called the "spell checker"? Of COURSE you have. But you have one of your own.
As an amateur writer, I make multiple passes through my work, but the best way to deal with it is to put it aside for at least a couple of months so that your stream of auto-correct is no longer in your short-term memory (or in computer terms, your cache has been flushed.) Then you can see more clearly that you DID make a whopper of an error. Unfortunately, for business deadlines, you can't put something aside for two months. So be nice to the document proof-readers. THEY don't have designer's hypnosis. They haven't lived with computers in the same way that you have. They don't have the built-in prejudices towards doing things in a particular way. They don't ASSUME to do things the right way. And you ... do.
notalwaysright.com
