RE: APIs: Where are the @#$% manuals?

I have to second Ken's comments as another who has been 
to Rochester and the UDC group. When I was put through 
the paces, I constantly went to the search function. 
After 4 or 5 times through scripts, they wanted me to 
find it with menus only. It was a struggle, as their 
perception of where something should be and mine were
vastly different.
I did get a few points across about putting all programming 
languages in the same tab and dragging the hardware options
into the mix.

John Brandt
iStudio400.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Graap, Ken [mailto:keg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 4:04 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: APIs: Where are the @#$% manuals?


I have actually gone to Rochester as a customer and participated in User
Design Center sessions with the InfoCenter development team...

They presented me with a particular InfoCenter design and then ask me to
find certain pieces information. As I struggled to find it, they took all
kinds of notes and even video taped me! The designs I worked with were not
very intuitive, as my struggling showed them.

They once gave me a bunch of cards with topics on them, and asked me to
build an InfoCenter structure.... That was interesting. It made me really
understand what a challenge it is to organize this mountain of information
into something easy to browse through. 

After these exercises, I always shared this thought with them... "It isn't
as important how you organize the information in InfoCenter, as it is to
provides a 1st class search engine to find what you want." 

Browsing through a hierarchical tree structure looking for information is
way too confusing and time consuming. 

When a top notch search engine like "Google" or Copernic" is incorporated
into InfoCenter, then it will become an information center we will all want
to use.

Kenneth  

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin C. Haase [mailto:JHaase@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 9:40 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: APIs: Where are the @#$% manuals?
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