Re: [IxDA Discuss] The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office
In my experience you can choose to describe your idea/concept/business case to the VP of Marketing using the jargon that gets you props on the IxDA list, or you can use the marketese vocabulary they are used to and makes them feel warm and fuzzy. Whatever gets the ball into the end zone, so to speak. On 19-Feb-08, at 7:34 PM, Christine Boese wrote: Is it really true traditional media can't deal with this radical idea of active creators talking back to the big media bosses, so we gotta diminish it by calling it by the old names, by defining it completely in terms of what we want these people to be, not what they are? Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office
My biggest - one of them at least, axes to grind - is the use of in-language, jargon, bad metaphors and cliches. The most annoying one, however, is the use of sports metaphors in diction. I have seen politicians speeches and marketing websites where a reader is subjected to paragraphs of nothing more than bad-metaphors and cliches strong together, one after another, signifying (in the Lacanian sense) nothing whatsoever. I don't want to touch-base to enhance synergies while mitigating against potentialities, knock it out of the park, hit a home run, score a touchdown while standing shoulder to shoulder with my team mates, or create any win-win situations that leverage my core competencies. For those so inclined - or those incapable of expressing themselves without the use of pretentious diction, false analogies, verbal false limbs, or glittering generalities - definitely read the classic Orwell - Politics amd the English Language, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm And that is my axe to grind today :-) On Feb 19, 2008 11:02 PM, Anthony Hempell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In my experience you can choose to describe your idea/concept/business case to the VP of Marketing using the jargon that gets you props on the IxDA list, or you can use the marketese vocabulary they are used to and makes them feel warm and fuzzy. Whatever gets the ball into the end zone, so to speak. On 19-Feb-08, at 7:34 PM, Christine Boese wrote: Is it really true traditional media can't deal with this radical idea of active creators talking back to the big media bosses, so we gotta diminish it by calling it by the old names, by defining it completely in terms of what we want these people to be, not what they are? Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- ~ will No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it. Alan Cooper - Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems --- will evans user experience architect [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office
Doesn't it just make you want to shout out 'buzzword bingo'? On Feb 20, 2008 8:44 AM, W Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My biggest - one of them at least, axes to grind - is the use of in-language, jargon, bad metaphors and cliches. The most annoying one, however, is the use of sports metaphors in diction. I have seen politicians speeches and marketing websites where a reader is subjected to paragraphs of nothing more than bad-metaphors and cliches strong together, one after another, signifying (in the Lacanian sense) nothing whatsoever. I don't want to touch-base to enhance synergies while mitigating against potentialities, knock it out of the park, hit a home run, score a touchdown while standing shoulder to shoulder with my team mates, or create any win-win situations that leverage my core competencies. For those so inclined - or those incapable of expressing themselves without the use of pretentious diction, false analogies, verbal false limbs, or glittering generalities - definitely read the classic Orwell - Politics amd the English Language, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm And that is my axe to grind today :-) On Feb 19, 2008 11:02 PM, Anthony Hempell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In my experience you can choose to describe your idea/concept/business case to the VP of Marketing using the jargon that gets you props on the IxDA list, or you can use the marketese vocabulary they are used to and makes them feel warm and fuzzy. Whatever gets the ball into the end zone, so to speak. On 19-Feb-08, at 7:34 PM, Christine Boese wrote: Is it really true traditional media can't deal with this radical idea of active creators talking back to the big media bosses, so we gotta diminish it by calling it by the old names, by defining it completely in terms of what we want these people to be, not what they are? Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- ~ will No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it. Alan Cooper - Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems --- will evans user experience architect [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] %u201CThe Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office%u201D
hmmm? is missing. I live on backspace. ;) but otherwise, it seems about right to me. I do do a lot of table work in most of my word docs, but I imagine that is an industry thing. -- dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=26088 Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office
At the Adaptive Path UXi conference, they spoke almost specifically about this - the fact that new webapps are coming out that try to give 20% of the functionality that 80% of the users will use instead of being everything for everybody. They used Writely as an example (which has since been bought up by Google) to show that people usually only need a subset of what is offered in Microsoft Word. The presentation made a good point that while those extra features are interesting and even useful in some situations, many people will never use them and have trouble finding what they DO need amidst the broad choices offered. I for one think that the Less is More mentality makes a lot of sense, because the interfaces get so complicated that even veteran users get lost going for features that would be somewhere around 26-50 on the 'most used' list. -- Marty Probably unsurprisingly, these numbers appear to show some kind of Pareto principle usage (20 % of the application commands are used in 80 % of the time). Does your experience support this? [1] http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/most-frequently-used-features -in.html -- Jens Meiert http://meiert.com/en/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office
snip I for one think that the Less is More mentality makes a lot of sense, because the interfaces get so complicated that even veteran users get lost going for features that would be somewhere around 26-50 on the 'most used' list. -- Marty Well, since I often get official communications from Microsoft in which the paragraphs are separated by double returns...and forms which don't use Word's built-in form technology...I suspect the feature-set long since passed the useful set. Part of this can be laid at the doorstep of mere feature creep; but part if it is also a failure to define a product (both these issues are endemic, they're just easiest to find in MS Word). What started life as a word-processor has quickly gone through the stage of formatting tool and is striving to be a full-fledged document/publishing tool (which it actually does rather poorly). Thus, features that are necessary to one level of tool are incorporated into all of them and the increased levels of complexity often lead to failure of the tools. Issues like the occasional randomization of numbering, the persistence of changes in tracked documents and so forth result from this complexity. All of this by way of saying: One of the critical pieces of good interaction design is deciding what set of interactions your application is going to support. Who has that responsibility will often not be an IxD, but it is still the job of the IxD to call attention to the problem. Katie -- Katie Albers [EMAIL PROTECTED] Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office
I'm as against bloatware as the next person, although feature overkill is sort of like pornography: you know it when you see it, which means the definition remains completely relativistic. However... I am someone who uses the deep features of software, and usually without reading the manual. I don't want to be pestered with them, but I like that I can find and harness real software power when I want it. But there's a bigger danger to warn of here, the dangers current mass media missteps provide the warning signs for, inadvertently. Lowest common denominator. (are you as sick of reality TV as I am?) When we start lumping all into a mass, as in the mass of mass media, it becomes the demographic of One, the oppressive and tyrannical demographic of the monolith, and excuse me whilest I run screaming from the room. I was drawn to interactive media because it deconstructed the mass of mass media; it dared to say one-to-many is evil and there can be something better, something even better than niche marketing and demographic hair-splitting on speed, something sometimes called many-to-many, but is really about diversity and about resisting the urge to lump audiences into undiscerning categories, even the category of audience, which necessarily constructs those in that category as passive consumers, and not interactive co-creators. That's really all I have to say, except to point up the irony of a term I've seen from time to time, a term that fills me with the overwhelming urge to sneeze bullshit! tangent Consumer-Generated Content. As in, huh?! Who came up with that brilliant term? Will it one day fall into the annals of jumbo shrimp et al? I'm less offended by the term user-generated content, because making use of something is doing something, an active activity. Consumer? A consumer is one who consumes something that is made by someone else. So what the hell is consumer-generated content except what (I suspect) is a marketing industry's deep structure refusal to accept the idea of active participants, CREATORS, makers, speakers with real voices, rather than the dominant marketing desire for compliant, passive, happy with what they are spoon-fed, consumers. (we could dig even deeper for irony here, and note the history of tuberculous gave us a term for what happens when consumers consume themselves... Consumption?) Consumer-generated content, a variation of horseless carriages, the name given to a thing by those who can't accept change except to define it in terms of what is known and familiar in the past, the good old days, the old time religion, when marketing was delivered to audiences assumed to be passive and one-size-fits-all for a mass media compliant consumer who did what he or she was told and liked it! Is it really true traditional media can't deal with this radical idea of active creators talking back to the big media bosses, so we gotta diminish it by calling it by the old names, by defining it completely in terms of what we want these people to be, not what they are? /tangent Chris On Feb 19, 2008 9:18 AM, Marty DeAngelo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At the Adaptive Path UXi conference, they spoke almost specifically about this - the fact that new webapps are coming out that try to give 20% of the functionality that 80% of the users will use instead of being everything for everybody. They used Writely as an example (which has since been bought up by Google) to show that people usually only need a subset of what is offered in Microsoft Word. The presentation made a good point that while those extra features are interesting and even useful in some situations, many people will never use them and have trouble finding what they DO need amidst the broad choices offered. I for one think that the Less is More mentality makes a lot of sense, because the interfaces get so complicated that even veteran users get lost going for features that would be somewhere around 26-50 on the 'most used' list. -- Marty Probably unsurprisingly, these numbers appear to show some kind of Pareto principle usage (20 % of the application commands are used in 80 % of the time). Does your experience support this? [1] http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/most-frequently-used-features -in.html -- Jens Meiert http://meiert.com/en/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help
