Re: Focus & proc'd? (Take II)

Subject: Re: Focus & proc'd? (Take II)
From: Isaac Rabinovitch <isaacr -at- mailsnare -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 09:50:16 -0800




Hart, Geoff wrote:


"Focus" simply isn't a word in the vocabulary of the vast majority of users:
it's a programming or UI design term, not something the average user ever
thinks of. When I suggested that you recast things from the viewpoint of the
reader (rather than the software), I didn't mean doing lots of paraphrasing,
I meant rewriting to focus on the user's task and not how the interface
implements that task.

"Focus" is not an implementation word. Every GUI provides provides some indication of exactly where the focus is. For example, MS Windows draws a little rectangle around the caption of a any push button that has the focus. (It's called, in fact, the focus rectangle.) Also, if you're going to document keyboard-only navigation (a feature GUI designers tend to neglect, but required if you're serious about accessibility compliance), it's hard to see how you could do so without introducing this word.

Somebody, I forget who, said that writing should be as simple as possible -- and no simpler! This is a case in point. It's neither here nor there that ordinary language doesn't use "focus" this way. Neither does it use "select" or "paste" or "file" in precisely the way these terms are used in interactive computing. You could argue that these other terms have intuitive analogs in the real world. But the same is true for "focus"!

If end-user documentation were just about telling people how to do things, then *maybe* you could get by without teaching the user any technical concepts. But all users, even the most technically naive and disinterested, need more than that. They need to stretch their brains, even if it's only by a tiny amount. If they operate in total ignorance, they set themselves up for the boring, confusing, intimdating experience so many computer user complain about.


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