Re: Useful Dumb User Questions
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg9047] Re: [mg8988] Useful Dumb User Questions
- From: Mark Evans <evans at gte.net>
- Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 01:42:26 -0400
- Organization: None
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi Dave, Thanks for responding. I was talking about the newsgroup, not Wolfram Research. I've already received one response that was exactly the kind of stuff I remonstrated against; thus the newsgroup. As for WRI, I commend the company for its amazing recent efforts toward more intuitive interfaces. I just think that once a person learns something, like driving a car for instance, it can become altogether too easy to forget the initial difficulties. When one then sees a novice going through the same difficulties, one can grow impatient. The point I tried to make was that ease-of-use should always be a primary consideration when the feature set is so enormous. Otherwise it is too easy to get lost in the woods, as so many of my coworkers have done in trying to use Mathematica. In light of this fact, I suggested that novice user questions might hold important clues about how to make the product easier to use. I don't have specifics to offer, just a general suggestion that this may be the case. Best regards, Mark