What are we doing to our re

[Deborah Adair <Deborah_Adair -at- TALIGENT -dot- COM>]

Mail*Link(r) SMTP               What are we doing to our readers?
(Monday morning rant & rave...)

I had an experience this weekend that made me wonder. I've been involved in
developing online information for the last five years. I'm generally  a
proponent of providing information online, but I've never believed that you
could just replace printed books with online books. Attempting to use a
Windows Tax program with all of the documentation on CD really brought that
home.

Now, there are other problems with the product-it's horribly slow on a 386,
the interface is *very* poorly designed, the prompts were not properly edited,
and so on. But the "help" and "onscreen information" was awful. No index,
twelve different places to look for information, and when I tried to launch
the "onscreen" book, it took 20 minutes to start and 2 minutes to turn each
page.  To me, it looked like a prime example of a company saying, "we need
online information" and "we can reduce costs if we ship on cd"--and having no
clue what impact it would have on their users. I'm one of those weirdos who
doesn't mind reading info online, and even I couldn't use their documentation.

I've used products from this company for several years, but I won't purchase
another Windows product from them. I got the distinct impression that neither
the programmers or writers had a clue what they were doing--mostly because the
information was presented so poorly. It's a very information-intensive
product, and I was really astounded at how bad some of that information was.
(Maybe it was that prompt that said to enter "you's data" that really got to
me...)

I think it's probably good to be in the frustrated user's shoes now and
then--just so we really understand what we're putting people through. Online
information can be very useful--but it takes careful planning. "Putting books
online" is great, but it's clearly not the whole answer. It's been awhile
since I've used a new Windows product--I really hope that this one isn't
representative of what's out there. If it is, no wonder people never use Help.

deb
deborah_adair -at- taligent -dot- com