RE: (no subject)

["Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentstar com>]

>I did see a study pubilshed ina Digital Press book in the early 80s that
>suggested a gender difference ebtween people who used Help, and saying
>that a menu item "Explain" was more heavily used. The point being that
>perhaps some people see asking for help as an admission of defeat.
>
>The word "explain" implies that it's the computer's fault for being
>unclear, not the user's fault for being stupid, and hence using an
>Explain menu doesn't bruise the ego.  Or so it was claimed.
>
>Lee

That is a good point, sorta like 'stopping and asking for directions'
<grin>.

I was thinking along the lines of when a user is willing to ask a
coworker/friend for help, but still hasn't tried the help menu.  Since
asking for help from a coworker would be equally (or more so) implying that
the user is admitting defeat, I would suggest that the asking for help from
a coworker has a different basis for users not using help systems than the
above. This happens frequently in my office, and I can generally answer the
question of a user within about 5-10 seconds by using help even if I know
nothing about the program.  Ditto with web searching, a user looks for 15-25
minutes and finds almost no article of relevance, whereas they ask me, and I
find almost exactly what was desired in 5-15 seconds (assuming it isn't some
ridiculously difficult or narrow information...).  The user is generally
choosing search terms that make sense, but are not the words that the
content creator used thus they sort through dozens or even hundreds of pages
without success.  Of course, naive users also have difficulty distinguishing
between relevant hits and irrelevant hits based on limited information, so
they generally end up having to read a great deal of a page before
discarding it as irrelevant.

Thus having expert users and software map the query to more relevant terms
and answers should save significant time for naive users.  Having relevancy
scoring (which I believe is being implemented in Evolution), would improve
the process even more.

Tom M.
TomM pentstar com