Re: Template system



El mié, 17-12-2003 a las 17:45, Jens Bech Madsen escribió:

> I will write a letter, therefore I will start out by locating my
> letter-creation tool, ie. my pencil. 
> 
> I need to bash in this nail, therefore I will locate my nail-bashing
> tool, ie. my hammer.
> 
> I don't understand why tools are regarded which such disdain as compared
> to the concept of the process itself. Without the tool, there is no
> process. It's not like products appear from thin air.

You evidently have right in saying that if you want to bash in a nail,
you need a hammer.  But you already know that.  What if you needed to
drill in a 36" hole with 0.1mm precision, on a titanium steel wall? 
This is exactly what happens when someone tries to teach a newbie
computer user.

The computer user might remember that for the next 2 minutes, but making
it stick in the user's mind is much, much harder.  Instead, teaching
newbies about creating new documents by right-clicking and going to the
new menu is much easier - they'll see Letter, Fax, or whatever
technology is installed onto their systems.

It will take the same time for the "Right-click...New" idea to stick in
their minds, but you can be sure you won't need to teach them ten
different applications.  They'll still need to learn how to use them,
but the process will be assisted because each time they create, say, a
Letter, the same application will open (or the application they chose on
the app list I proposed a few mails ago).

People *don't* know that they need OpenOffice Writer to write a Letter. 
People also *don't* know about the New menu and the templates.  But the
New menu and the Templates fulfill two functions:

* show a centralized place where the user can easily digest "what he can
do with his computer"
* partially alleviate the need to learn app<->document type association

Which, in the end, are the ideas behind the MIME system as well.

> 
> 
> 
> > >  The
> > > document-centric way seems the reverse of this, i.e. "Let me find a
> > > location in which I will create a file, which will contain a letter
> > > which I will write."
> > > 
> > > Like I say, I'm not doubting anyone, but this seems counter-intuitive
> > to
> > > me, and apparently, as you say, hasn't been the way that people
> > actually
> > > do things even though that option is available to them. So maybe it
> > just
> > > hasn't been implemented properly in the past, I don't know. I'm just a
> > > curious lurker, so if anyone has a study that can enlighten me, I
> > would
> > > be very interested.
> > 
> > No studies =(  that I know of.  Supposedly back in '94, Microsoft
> > invested millions and determined this was the way to go, hence the
> > New... menu and the Templates directory, while hiding the applications
> > on a Start submenu.
> 
> Maybe this is why I find Windows in general so frustrating to work with?
-- 
	Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)
	GPG key ID: keyserver.net C1033CAD

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