Re:Where in the USA Is This?
by chefandy on Monday July 03, 2023 @11:59PM
(#36582070)
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.
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Re:Where in the USA Is This?
by mitchdoogle on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @01:46AM
(#36582660)
It seems to me like some of the most successful commercial software virtually requires either reading the documentation, or doing some sort of training
Or being taught informally by a colleague or a friend. I am curious which is most prevalent!
Such as?
Excel, SAP, AutoCAD, Photoshop, and many many others. All require quite a bit of training even if you already know similar software.
I learned excel and photoshop on my own, without documentation, just figuring things out as needed. Asking someone "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.