Re: Rumors of FrameMaker's Death are Untrue, says Adobe

[Tom Huffman <tlhuffman -at- EARTHLINK -dot- NET>]

Darren:

Your post begins with a definition of intuition and then your argument proceeds
to ignore it. "Immediate cognition" entails that the object being perceived is
so simple and self-evident that any normal person would immediately understand
it. What you discuss is not this at all. Granted, Word is reasonably well
integrated into and consistent with the rest of MS Office, but to benefit from
this we must have prior acquaintance with MS Office. Because it's, well, made by
Microsoft, most people are. However, this has nothing whatever to do with its
elements being intuitive. It's merely familiar. The English language is familiar
to all of us, but it is in many well known ways very unintuitive.

I didn't intend to comment upon the relative intuitiveness of FM vs. Word. I
wish people would stop using the term entirely as it usually just shorthand for
what they know and like.

******

> Without opening up the beastly Word/Frame debate, here's my two cents on
> intuitiveness:
>
> Intuition: a. The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of
> rational processes; immediate cognition.
>
> Denigrating familiarity in software design is, I think, ill-advised. MS Word
> is intuitive, and more intuitive than FrameMaker, because it adheres to
> Microsoft's standards for interfaces. If I've used Access, or Front Page or
> any other (ubiquitous) Microsoft product, I intuitively understand how Word
> operates. The very commonness of Microsoft's products makes them familiar
> and thus intuitive. The icons, menus, ToolTips, online Help etc. are
> generally consistent. The same can't be said for FrameMaker or any of the
> Adobe products--each product has a different look, and, for example,
> FrameMaker's help system is, to be gentle, irritatingly unique. Word's
> dialog boxes are, simply put, better designed. Compare the Preferences
> dialog box in Frame with the Options dialog box in Word. Which is easier to
> use? Which provides more functionality?
>
> Let's be honest. If you took somebody who'd never used a computer before and
> offered them these two products, which one would they find easier to use?
>
> I will admit that FrameMaker has certain advantages over MS Word.
> Intuitiveness is not one of them. DB.

--
Tom Huffman
tlhuffman -at- earthlink -dot- net


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