basic but still intriquing discussion, tks for bearing with it. It
seems overly subtle perhaps, but not really... I had a user use
select her entire transcript and "CUT" and it disappeared... she
wrote me an email asking what to do !
I wrote back... "Just paste it back again..." of course by then it
was too late. Anyway, I'm using "send" the app to save itself now
every 5 minutes and will shortly cause the whole thing to dump
the .xml file one each save *and* save the transcript into a global
they can revert too as a triple safety against losing work. So if my
app or my rev player stand alone or their system goes up in smoke,
they will have their work up to the last five minutes on the hard
drive. Point: these kinds of users are very easily confused and will
just "stop in their tracks" if things don't seem obvious.
I like your 2 questions 4 states diagram.
Made me think my problem is in the use of "finished" which is
ambiquous because what it really means is
a) "user has completde transcription of the last .mp3 file, has
proofread the text and successfully uploaded the xml file to our
server here and is ready to start a new one... clean slate..."
b) Having done that, and downloaded some new lectures to transcribe,
they are supposed to then select a new audio file to transcribe. This
dialog is a fail safe to make sure they actually completed a) above
before starting a new one... if they do start a new one, the data in
the substack "header" is cleared...
Also clearing the header is a really an internal maintenance thing,
like wiping off the black board the next class... the students in the
next class really don't need to know about that event any more than
we need to tell them "I am about to put empty into all the globals
in this stack..." [i.e. in answer to your question... no, the user
would never want to retain the header info when starting a new
transcript.]
All we really need to do is check ask the user if they succeed with
a) above and then proceed.
How about this (using Thomas's idea to just re-write the question...) :
Answer "Was your last transcript complete and successfully uploaded?"
with "Yes" or "No"
Sivakatirswami
On Jun 27, 2005, at 11:17 AM, Mark Wieder wrote:
Sivakatirswami-
Monday, June 27, 2005, 1:30:58 PM, you wrote:
S> answer "Are you finished with the last one? If so, shall I clear
S> the header info?"
S> with
S> "Cancel" or "Clear Header"
S> Better?
I like the "Clear Header". That makes it obvious what will happen if I
press the button. The concept of "Cancel" has always bothered me in
contexts like this.
If you are presenting two questions then there are four possible
states for the user. It looks to me like you are taking care of two of
those:
clear header
Y N
finished ------------------
Y | Clear | |
N | | Cancel |
------------------
If I'm the user and I'm finished with the last one, what will happen
when I press "Cancel"? Will my changes disappear? If I'm not done what
does Cancel mean? What if I'm done with the last one but I don't want
to clear the header info? In this last case, I don't really know what
you're intending, so I don't know if that's even an option - it may be
clear from where I am in the application.
--
-Mark Wieder
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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