"User friendliness" (UF) is an inchoate notion.
Applications need to be UF. Not all systems interfaces need be or even
should be UF.
Circa 1910 anyone who undertook an automobile trip from Paris to Lyon or New
York to Philadelphia needed to be qualified for membership in the [not yet
founded] Society of Automotive Engineering in order to have any prospect of
completing his trip. This is no longer the case. Such trips are now
unremarkable because the infrastructure required for them is in place.
Interestingly, however, the SAE has not been abolished. The needs and
preoccupations of automotive engineers are very different from those of car
drivers; but they are complementary in the sense that car drivers must look
implicitly to automotive engineers for progress in car design and
performance.
Individual error messages may be clear or muddled, require revision or not;
but reifying the content of a message into a generic complaint about a z/OS
UF deficiency is not helpful.
Many of the messages produced by z/OS are already too user friendly, in the
special sense that when parsed they turn out to be saying:
It's too complicated, and you wouldn't understand anyway.
UF is inseparable from dumbed down content. This is perhaps---I'm not
sure---regrettable. It certainly means that different kinds of manuals are
needed for different kinds of people.
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721-1817
USA
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