Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Are you sitting comfortably
Then I'll begin.
This is how Listen with Mother started, way back when you could make sexist assumptions about the make up of your daytime radio audience. It's a great line and still used on the rather excellent cbeebies today.
Mothers were also used in an interesting comment on usability on Tom Kyte's blog, to whit What would my mother do? That's the test I always apply to Windows software, and it usually fails. If I can't fix it, what would my 70 year-old mother do?
I truly believe that for surfing the web, she'd be better off with Linux and Firefox/Opera. its an excellent test, one I rather suspect Joel's Fog Creek software may have had in mind when creating co-pilot.
Unfortunately, I rather suspect that its a test not applied often enough to 'Geek' software, I have two examples;
1. Linux. It just so happens that I have installed Fedora Core 4 at home today - yes 10g R2 will go on it - later. It asked me for a root password, for partitioning information and a list of packages to install. All of which were easy enough for me to take in, but someone who doesn't know how computers work? probably not.
2. EM10g. Now here we need, I think, to revise our mental image of the user a little, we need someone competent with computers who has just taken over responsibility for a database. Think the 2nd line support tech just promoted.
what do they do with this? Oh yes - the failed backup is wrong and the number of up instances is incorrect as well.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
