In an earlier email, Dave Salt said:
1) If something is put in front of someone (even if it's as small as a new option on a menu), people will eventually discover it. If it's buried in tutorials and/or user manuals, few people will ever discover it.
Steve Comstock replied:
This only works if it can be packaged that way. Your examples of HILITE and COMPARE commands were added as part of the editor; these were added as part of the drop down menus but hardly anyone ever uses those, in my experience.
Steve, I agree completely. Putting things in drop-down menus is almost as good as burying them. I never use drop-down menus as I think there are FAR better ways to make users aware of available features. For example, if it had been my responsibility to introduce the HILITE and COMPARE commands, this is how I would have approached it:
For HILITE, I would have made it the default setting. When someone went into an edit profile for the first time, I would have turned HILITE on and displayed a message something along the lines of 'Highlighting has been turned on. If you want to turn it off, here's how". For COMPARE, I would have waited until the first time someone went into ISPF option 3.12 or 3.13, and then I would have displayed a one-time message saying something like "Did you know you can now run a compare from within an edit session? This is how you do it." I'm not saying this would have been a perfect solution, but (IMO) it would have been better than nothing.
In an earlier email, Dave Salt said:
2) If software is user-friendly and 'intuitively obvious', people will try it. If it's easy to learn and use, they'll carry on using it. Otherwise, they'll never use it again.
Steve Comstock replied:
Well, yes, that's always been true.
Although the statement might have seemed obvious, the reason I made it was because I was replying to an email in which the following was said:
From: "Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> My experience has been that the users don't learn the alternative interfaces that are there, even when they have been available for decades.
If an alternative ISPF interface has been there for decades and people aren't using it, then something is wrong with it. Namely, it's either too complicated to learn/use, or it just doesn't provide enough benefit to make it worthwhile.
An alternative ISPF interface has to be BOTH of the following: (a) more powerful than the regular interface and (b) easier to use than the regular interface. This isn't easy to achieve, because if something is more powerful then usually it's more complex. Take the ISPF Workplace (i.e. ISPF option 11) as a prime example. However, it IS possible to acheive both things. The case I stated where 1,000 people began using an alternate ISPF interface after simply stumbling across it (i.e. with no formal introduction or training whatsoever) is a prime example.
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