This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by Keith Ray.
Original Post: Turning Off Potential Passionate Users.
Feed Title: MemoRanda
Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html
Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics.
No one is passionate about something they suck at. If they can get beyond the beginner stage, and begin to "kick butt", they can become passionate about whatever tool is helping them do that. This is why so many Mac users are passionate about the Mac. They get beyond the beginner stage rapidly.
On the other hand, Microsoft Windows will give you terrible error messages that make a beginning user feel stupid. Here's some examples:
In some versions of Windows, trying to save an empty file in Notepad will get you this error message: "You have not entered any text to be saved. Type some text, and then try again." This frustrates people who like to name the file by saving it before writing the text.
Another error message is just useless: "Copy Profile Error: The operation completed successfully".
And this one is fatally stupid: "Cannot delete filename. There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again."
And those error messages will still be there no matter how experienced you are at using Windows. Some people get beyond those messages, learning to ignore those condescending error messages, and become passionate Windows users. But the percentage of users becoming passionate is much greater for Mac users than for Windows users.
Steve Yegge writes about Python not being marketed properly. He seems to like Python; he wants it to popular. His example is purely about this "creating passionate users" experience. Quote:
[...]consider what happens when you type "python" at a command prompt. It fires up a little interactive interpreter. At the prompt, if you type "quit", it responds with 'Use Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit.'
Well that's not very nice, is it? It *knows* you want to quit, even going so far as to call you an EOF, whatever that means. (Yes, you and I both know, but is it really the right thing to show to a beginner? Hardly.) Why didn't it just quit, then?
If you were to bring this issue up on a Python newsgroup at any time in the past 10 years, someone would tersely have instructed you to go look at the FAQ. Or they'd have explained that having 'quit' quit would be a strict violation of the semantics of the REPL [...] blah Blah BLAH [....]
Never mind that it's patently obvious that "quit" should just quit the frigging shell, semantics be damned. They don't care a whit, because they're focused on the "right thing" at the expense of the user experience. There's an old adage for this; it's called "missing the forest for the trees."
Of course it's just as difficult to figure out how to exit the Perl shell, if not more so. But if you were to bring it up on a mailing list or newsgroup, some nice Perl person would come along, eager to show you how to add one more snippet of job security to your lineup of Perl folklore, and would spend an hour explaining how cool it is that you can quit the shell with a single keystroke, one that works in other Unix commands as well, and then maybe show you how to hack the Perl binary so that "quit" also exits the shell for you. The difference is huge: both shells have that crappy misfeature, but Python folks will bore you with justifications while the Perl folks excite you with marketing.
[...] 'cuz Ruby is soooo cool. Did I mention that "quit" exits the shell in Ruby? It does, and so does Ctrl-D. [...] Ruby's WAY fun [...]
By the way, one of things that rocks on the Mac these days, is that just about anywhere I'm typing a piece of text, even in a the web-browser or in the File-Save dialog, I can control-click on a word to spell-check it. That popup menu also includes the option "Search In Google", which is great if the word isn't found in the built-in dictionary. I used that feature just now when saving this file before publishing it to my blog. I didn't have to add software or otherwise "turn on" this feature - it's just there.
Kathy Sierra talks about passionate users in this MP3 recorded at a conference.
Previous Topic
