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> I don't think there is anything unfriendly about needing a manual. It is, however, very user friendly if something is designed such that a user never has to
by BeetleB 2y ago
> I don't think there is anything unfriendly about needing a manual.
It is, however, very user friendly if something is designed such that a user never has to look at a manual.
If someone makes an interface where you can do quite a bit without ever reading one, and you read it only for the finer points, that's also pretty user friendly.
I never read a manual to use my smartphone when I bought my first one. I think most people will agree that if you buy a smartphone and you can't do anything on it until you read a fantastically well written manual, they will consider the phone to be user unfriendly.
- skydhash 2y agoA smartphone is very restricted in interaction. You can learn most of the patterns by just playing with it. Yo will still need the manual to do stuff that requires sequences of actions The terminal is even more restricted, but it has greater versality because commands can be anything. You don’t go to the manual to learn how to use a terminal, you go to it to learn what are the commands and their parameter. And the shell that evaluates the command can be complex enough to require its own manual. TUIs are more like musical instruments (without the tangibility). You can discover pretty easily that hitting the keys produces sounds, but playing a piece well requires training and a lot of music theory to communicate with fellow musicians. It seems fair that operating a computer requires the same thing.