canibalism

[Carlos Macedo Gomes]

Speaking of "stupid" users vs "naive" users .  Below's a link to an
good article on revamping the PC and the Pop Culture of computing by
computing pioneer (and recipient of ACM's Turing Award for 2004) Alan
Kay.  I like his take on having usage models (and QA/testing) not only
include normal end users (and experts) but also children.

"The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of
curiosity in the computing profession. And it's very characteristic of
a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really
live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past.
I'm saying there's a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for
anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other
than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, "Who knows only
his own generation remains always a child." People who live in the
present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it
starts removing the possibility of having a future."

Full article here:
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2089567,00.asp

More on Alan Kay here:
http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

On 3/6/07, Josh Coffman <josh_coffman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> My personal experience is that I may tend to feel a user is 'stupid' (though not really) because of a communication issue.
> As techies, we think differently than the average person. Now I do have an occasional story about a user that changes all the
> fonts and window decorations to be the same colors as the backgrounds... or the mouse that doesn't work because the
> computer isn't on. Not that those people are truly stupid (though its hard to not think so), just that things that are obvious to me
> aren't obvious to them.
>
> Patience and understanding resolve more issues than judgment and frustration.
>
> -j
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>
> To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2007 7:58:05 AM
> Subject: Re: canibalism
>
> On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 23:36 -0700, Technomage wrote:
> > On Monday 05 March 2007 22:39, Josh Coffman wrote:
> > > huh? cannibalism and programming.. not my experience.
> > > First, when you enjoy your job its more of a hobby that you get paid to do.
> > > Second, this group should give you a good indication of the general
> > > helpfulness techies have toward each other. (Hey, its us against stupid
> > > users, right? kidding.)
> >
> > it may be a joke, but believe me, thats also serious (I know, I deal
> > with 'stupid users' sometimes, and boy are they a pain!). anyway, yeah.
> > enjoyment of a 'job' makes it a lot easier to do in the long run.
> ----
> I understood Josh was kidding about stupid users but this wasn't
> kidding.
>
> I would love for someone to explain the notion of what represents a
> stupid user because I understand uninformed users and software that
> doesn't account for all of the things that users might do but I would
> like to know what constitutes a stupid user so that I can prepare
> myself.
>
> Craig
>
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-- 
powerofprimes at gmail.com
Carlos Macedo Gomes
_sic itur ad astra_