End-User "Training"

[Edgar Allen]

Forwarded message:
>
>End users, on the other hand, tend not to be explorers.  They have
>jobs/tasks to do, and they're not going to be happy hunting around looking
>for how that task is approached in a new system.  They want to know "How do
>I do a mail merge?", "How do I make a shortcut to my mail program?", "How do
>I print a graphic I've scanned?", and they want to know it on a "Click the
>blue button" level, not on a "Well, there's Star Office, ABIWord, and
>KSpread, you could use one of those...".
>
>Does anybody know of a good source for this kind of instruction?  Is there
>any available yet?
>
    This gives me an image of 80,000 half page HOWTO files and a search
    engine to locate relevant ones.

    I theorize that your "common user" will complain that the search engine
    returns 100 ways to do what he asked for and that he has no way of knowing
    which ones are relevant to his distro/window manager/shell/printer/modem type/...

    These sort of decisions about applicability for a particular environment have
    always been handled, mostly, by asking the local Guru.  Who would be willing
    to explain the reasoning behind a particular choice if asked by a young "explorer",
    otherwise known as a Guru Wannabee or Accolade.

    This system is not about to be replaced by the "80,000 + search engine" solution
    above because people are lazy and the Guru approach is less work for everybody but
    the Guru, and he gets paid for trying to keep up on the reasons for the choices.

    I like to use a term from a John Brunner novel from the late sixties, Systems
    Rationalizer, as opposed to the more generic and less accurate System Administrator.

    Open Source and Unix grew up together and neither tolerates a solution which can
    be replaced by a more efficient one.

    If you can figure a way for "Sandra from Accounting" to choose the proper tool to
    use in her 100 line shell script to total the sales for each member of the sales
    team, group them by manager, and email the results to the correct managers with
    more efficiency than the Guru approach we will all be grateful.

    Each user must learn a little bit about what tools exist or can be easily built
    to handle their particular tasks because no one, not even the Guru, knows the needs
    of their job better than they do.  If Sandra cannot write the shell script then she
    needs to find somebody who can with a little guidance about which data she wants
    and where/how it can be obtained.

    The "I just want a simple recipe" approach is "Windows Thinking" because it
    assumes that there are a fixed number of tasks that we all do variations of.
    The real world has some 100,000,000+ PCs and users as varied as artists working
    on art for this seasons' catalog to the guy trying to figure out the coverage
    pattern of the antenna he just installed.

    You are in need of millions of recipes without taking hardware differences
    into consideration.  No "common user" will want to be faced with choosing between
    eighty different recipes.

    Somebody has to learn why they all exist, hence the Guru approach is the most
    efficient we have come up with so far.  Feel free to suggest alternatives.