Re: Toolbars

[David Jones/KSBEISD <David_Jones/KSBEISD -dot- KSBEISD -at- DATAHUB -dot- COM>]

Susan W. Gallagher said the following re Toolbars
>What I was trying to say, I think--and this is where our conversations
just miss each other--is that there are lots of users out there who just
plain ol' don't want to learn any more about the software than what they
need to get the job done. And they are just as much our customers and our
audience as the users who want to explore and learn and figure out how
it all works.<

Let me relate something about someone I worked with, a "user who just plain ol'
don't want to learn any more about the software" et al.

I came to work one day (not at my current employer!) and noticed a systems
analyst working away at something. When I left at the end of the day, he was
still there working. I'd been through there off and on during the day and never
once saw him away from the computer.

I noticed that he was working on a long technical document. He kept going back
and forth, from one part to another, cutting and pasting. So out of curiousity,
I asked him what he was doing. Turns out he was creating a table of contents,
for a heavily-structured document roughly 1000p long -- by copying and pasting
each heading into the TOC section of his document, then searching for that
heading, returning to the TOC, and typing in the page number he'd found. I
found out that he'd had to do this regularly through the lifespan of the
document. When I suggested using the wordprocessing package's TOC functions, he
angrily told me he didn't have time to learn that, he had to get the document
done for delivery the next morning.

Some of those "don't want to learn more" people will cling to that refusal to
learn even when it hurts.

FWIW

David Jones, Technical Writer
David_Jones/KSBEISD -dot- KSBEISD -at- Datahub -dot- com

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