Phil St. Romain
05-22-2002, 08:16 PM
Some of you are going to love these stories. :D
A few weeks ago, I set up my sister-in-law with a used iBook, OS X as her default OS, and the five apps she would be using on the Dock. She learned the basics quickly and was sending email, surfing the net, and cranking out word-processing documents in no time--this from a woman who'd never really done much with computers.
Last weekend when she visited us, she and my daughter were doing a variety of things on my daughter's Bondi Blue iMac, which still runs OS 9.1. My sister-in-law watched my daughter work for awhile, then had a turn doing something. She clicked around a bit, asked about the Finder, where the home folder was, and then remarked, "This is so user-unfriendly!" :)
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At work, we're replacing a number of work stations running W 95 with XP. And, you guessed it, the comments again are along the lines of "this is so different," "where's my stuff," and even: "this is the most user-unfriendly computer on the planet."
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Gui principles aside, it seems that for most people, what is user-friendly is what they're already familiar with. I even know a woman who's still using DOS instead of Windows because she knows DOS and Windows "is too hard to learn." Go figure that one.
So when you hear veteran Mac users saying OS X is "user-unfriendly," maybe these little vignettes can help us understand what they really mean. ;)
A few weeks ago, I set up my sister-in-law with a used iBook, OS X as her default OS, and the five apps she would be using on the Dock. She learned the basics quickly and was sending email, surfing the net, and cranking out word-processing documents in no time--this from a woman who'd never really done much with computers.
Last weekend when she visited us, she and my daughter were doing a variety of things on my daughter's Bondi Blue iMac, which still runs OS 9.1. My sister-in-law watched my daughter work for awhile, then had a turn doing something. She clicked around a bit, asked about the Finder, where the home folder was, and then remarked, "This is so user-unfriendly!" :)
----------
At work, we're replacing a number of work stations running W 95 with XP. And, you guessed it, the comments again are along the lines of "this is so different," "where's my stuff," and even: "this is the most user-unfriendly computer on the planet."
----------
Gui principles aside, it seems that for most people, what is user-friendly is what they're already familiar with. I even know a woman who's still using DOS instead of Windows because she knows DOS and Windows "is too hard to learn." Go figure that one.
So when you hear veteran Mac users saying OS X is "user-unfriendly," maybe these little vignettes can help us understand what they really mean. ;)