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Not getting disagreement here.
What I do notice though is that today's new applications have zero Help
Key information, and that is a design choice; if it needs a help panel
than it needs a redesign. There are FAQ pages though, and those seem to
be self-managed. The user base asks and answers the questions using
their unique vocabulary and skill levels. Whether the FAQ should be
5250 or web seems to me to be a business choice.
Wizards... great tool. But nothing about wizarding demands GUI; it
could be 5250 just as easily as not.
Tribal knowledge is an ever-changing, voluble mass of fact, lore, and
tradition. A 5-year old document explaining current tribal knowledge
will most likely be as useful as a 2015 stackflow answer.
Home-grown applications... now there is a feral beast that can't be
tamed. In the summer of 2019 I got a call for an issue with a program I
wrote in 1998. It took a bit to travel back in time. The "fix" was to
use option 8 on the menu. Their response was "We have all wondered what
that was for. No one here has ever used it." Nor, apparently, had they
used F1 where it was explained.
I guess my point is that old stuff is old stuff. Updating it can be
done, even with 5250.
On 3/9/2020 7:22 PM, Peter Dow wrote:
Retaining tribal knowledge I think is easier in a GUI due to the
larger space - more explanations of data fields on the screen without
having to press some help key.
For infrequent data maintenance, wizards that have lots of explanation
are possible in GUI and text based screens, and can really help with
that knowledge retention.
A lot of "home-grown" applications don't take the time for any of that.
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