Re: [Usability] User knowledge level setting

[Nadyne Mielke <nmielke acm org>]

On Friday, February 27, 2004, at 03:12 PM, Fredrik Rambris wrote:

> A feature I came up with quite some time ago is to have a userwide
> setting where I set my level of knowledge of computer usage. Then on
> each program I can override this.

[snip the rest]

Users are generally not novices on everything in the system.  My 
department's secretary, for example, is a goddess with Lotus WordPro 
[1], pretty good with Lotus Notes, and can't figure out how to cut text 
out of a PDF when viewing it in Adobe Acrobat Reader.  Although you 
attempt to address this with an application-specific override, how many 
users are really going to want to spend the time and effort necessary 
to set this on their computer?  That's a significant time investment.

Even if a user can set their level of knowledge in each particular 
application, many users are experts when using some subset of 
functionality in the application, but not the whole application.  I 
consider myself a novice with Lotus Notes, but I've shown the 
aforementioned secretary how to use its office and island settings for 
database replication.

Due to this, users have a difficult time determining whether they're an 
expert or a novice.  Returning to the secretary, she views herself as 
an expert user of PDFs, since she opens them regularly.  I wouldn't 
label her in the same manner, since I consider cutting and pasting to 
be a required skill for an expert user in this context.

The grey area in the middle ('average', in your nomenclature) is 
particularly problematic.  What does that mean?  What functions do you 
show to the average user that you hide from the novice user, and what 
functions do you hide from the average user that you show to the expert 
user?

Many users, when presented with an interface that will hide 
functionality from them, will tend to choose expert.  Users don't tend 
to like the idea that their applications are hiding something from 
them, or that the application thinks that they're too dumb to be able 
to use all of the functionality in the application.

What happens if the user uses an application on another computer, or 
simply when another user is logged into their computer?  Everything 
will look different, and they probably won't know why at first glance.

How does the user know that they have progressed beyond the level that 
they set when they started using the application?  Are they supposed to 
guess that their application has more functionality, and bump 
themselves up?  My guess is that most users will just keep their 
settings where they are, and figure out workarounds to complete a task 
if the functionality isn't readily available.  (That brings up the 
related topic of support.  I pity the poor tech support guy who has to 
explain to someone how to get to functionality that is currently hidden 
to them.)

/nm

[1] That is Lotus's document-creation software.  It's roughly 
equivalent to MS Word.