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As a designer, I can assure you that 90+% of computer users will never read a line of actual software documentation in their entire lives. It's not because they
by chefandy 3y ago
As a designer, I can assure you that 90+% of computer users will never read a line of actual software documentation in their entire lives. It's not because they're lazy, it's because they don't have to. In many cases it doesn't even exist. The FOSS community almost universally blames marketing and advertising for the dominance of commercial consumer-level software, but that doesn't hold a candle to the experience upgrade of using professionally designed software. To people with a mental model of the way computers function, the differences seem trivial, or even annoying. To everybody else, they're essential. To a developer, an interface is the way users interact with the application. To everybody else, the interface is the application.
- mitchdoogle 3y agoIt seems to me like some of the most successful commercial software virtually requires either reading the documentation, or doing some sort of training
- xapata 3y agoOr being taught informally by a colleague or a friend. I am curious which is most prevalent!
- chefandy 3y agoSuch as?
- moqmar 3y agoExcel, SAP, AutoCAD, Photoshop, and many many others. All require quite a bit of training even if you already know similar software.
- chefandy 3y agoI learned excel and photoshop on my own, without documentation, just figuring things out as needed. Asking a coworker "do you know how to refer to the value in another cell?" is not the same as reading documentation. Both SAP and Autocad are super domain specific, and likely used by far fewer than 1% of computer users. Even then, new CAD self-learners would almost certainly start with a newer, more intuitive CAD app to get their feet wet.