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Mario faces the display vs. appears dilemma. A number of people advise him
to use "appears" or else to re-write the instructions to need either.
I don't think a re-write of "to get to the X screen, click A" is always in
order, as sometimes the user is going through a sequence of screens as part
of a process (wizard or otherwise). I will say things like "Click A to
continue", but often I also want to name the screen they should now see, as
a verification check - but the user may not really care what the screen is
called, other than to verify he is in the right place.
I used to HATE "appears". I hated the idea of a magical screen appearing out
of nowhere. The application was on an AS/400 system and people realized they
were logged into "the system". So I usually wrote "The system displays the X
screen." It didn't really matter if the users thought "the system" referred
to our application "system" or computer system, as both have some degree of
truth and can work as a mental model.
Now my users are usually on Windows running the client application that
connects to the server. I thought about saying "the system displays", but
the users may then end up wondering "which system?" or wonder what I even
mean (as "the system" is no longer so monolithic), so I've turned to saying
either "The X window appears" or "You should now see the X window".
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