peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (08/23/83)
I think that many people STAY novices for a very long time, since they are intimidated by the machine in the first place and don't stick around long enough to become experts. Those first few sessions are very important and I think it makes perfect sense to study novices in that context. And they WILL be studied, if only for economic reasons; a system which can make the user feel comfortable in the first five minutes will sell better than one which cannot, all other things being equal (which means, largely, that expert performance should not be compromised). Casual users are indeed a different matter. I suppose a good question is, are they perpetual novices, or are they very slow learning novices becoming competent? p. rowley, U. Toronto, utcsrgv!peterr
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (08/24/83)
I did not say that studying novices was silly. i did say that I believed designing systems for them was. If they are going to outgrow the system then perhaps you have given them the wrong system. I get the impression from talking to micro-computer vendors that some salesmen are working on the 'make it slick, gimicky and moronic' school of product design. If they user is not intimidated then he will buy it. This is good from a sales point of view, but not so good from an ethical point of view. Some people seem to believe that a system which has 'removable training wheels' is the best. I am not sure whether this is always possible to design. In some software I have seen the hooks for the training wheels destroy the once elegant software underneath. I have written such code myself. This may only be a reflection of my own inadequacies, I must hasten to admit, but a menu system that I converted to a keyword with option system (after people became disenchanted with the slow menu) still had a strict tree heirarchal structure assumed as part of the code. While users could now avoid the slow redraw of the screen, they still had the 'when from node to node I'd want to leap across the tree I'm forced to creep' problem. I could not force the programs to all fit under a command syntax at this point in time either. Had I not put the menu in (at someone else' insistance), the program which is now being used would not have had my concept of 'this has to fit onto this part of the tree because this is where the user will logically want it' as an integral part of the program, and would have been a better program from my point of view. I have a 'gut feeling' that casual users do not fit into the continuum between naive users and experts. 'Gut feelings' are nice, but not very rigorously scientific. Since I have only been partially able to make a list of what differentiates a casual user from one of the other 2 categories, it is a little hard to formulate an experiment (which no one is likely to let me run anyway). I was wondering if someone out there had already done this. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura