This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Mind-Reading is Bad 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. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

People aren't good at mind-reading (another term for mind-reading is "making stuff up" -- see any comedy of errors for examples). Software is even worse at mind-reading. The worst features in Microsoft Word are those that attempt to do mind-reading... auto-formatting, auto-capitalization, auto-correction, etc.

A blogger has finally explained where some of the madness in Word's auto-formatting comes from: attempting to interpret the user hitting the TAB key in various situations as if the user has formed habits from type-writers, which don't have auto-indent. [However, typewriter users don't hit the TAB key in the middle of paragraph in order to indent the whole paragraph...]

Two problems with this particular mind-reading is that (1) eventually users learn that a word-processor is not a typewriter [that is, if the word-processor behaves consistently and predictably, which Word, to all external appearances, does not], and (2) most people learning to type TODAY are learning on computers, not typewriters. Trying to sometimes emulate a typewriter in a word-processor is about as useless as sometimes emulating a slide-rule when the application is a spreadsheet: oh, the user just dragged the mouse horizontally to the left here -- instead of selecting text or cells, I'll reduce the value displayed instead.

The same blogger also says: here: "People who tend to curse Word have had significant prior experience with some other word processing and/or document producing software. People who don’t have that kind of prior experience tend to find Word’s power and features very helpful." I used Word 1.0 and several succeeding versions, and I curse current versions of Word. Does using Word 1.0 count as "some other word processing... software"? Is someone with no experience of alternative programs really finding Word to be helpful? Perhaps they blame themselves whenever Word does something confusing -- self-blaming is very often the case with inexperienced computer users -- so their evaluation of Word has a built-in bias. Jerry Weinberg has a rule about always looking for three interpretations: what else could users of Word, who have no experience with alternatives, be thinking when they say Word is "powerful"?

He also says "I don’t make software for Aunt Tillie." Well, yes, you do. Word's monopoly status in the word-processing market for Mac and Windows means that you're making software for everybody, not just power-users. And that mind-reading about TAB key usage certainly sounds like trying to cater to Aunt Tillie, who learned to type on a typewriter 30 years ago.