At 10:36 AM -0800 2/2/97, Paul Hoffman wrote:
>Unfortunately, the same can be said for Apple and its employees, from my
>personal list management experience (I say "unfortunately" because I'm a
>card-carrying Mac enthusiast).
I don't disagree. There are idiots elsewhere. My email the last few
days proves this. What I found significant, and why I brought it up,
was how the percentages of "issues" coming from AOL users was so much
higher than I was seeing elsewhere. Not that AOL was the *only*
problem, or that problems were unique to it, but that the problems
coming out of AOL were out of proportion to the net as a whole.
We've argued back and forth about AOL ad nauseum, mostly with people on
one side or the other making broad statements based on personal
feelings. I finally have some real data that I think is useful to put
it in perspective. What we do with that data is still TBD....
>So, what can we do to educate the members of our lists? What can we do to
>reduce the problems caused by the users who can't/won't be educated about
>the basics? Is this an issue of education or enforcement?
Yes. First, a big key: "education" is not the answer. USENET has proven
this year in and year out for decades. You can only write so many
intros, so many FAQs, so many netiquettes. You can drop a horse in the
middle of a river, and he'll still die of thirst if he won't open his
mouth...
At some point, "education" loses economy of scale. It's like stereo
equiptment: the first $500 gets you 90% of the way, and then from
there, how close you want to get to 100% of the ultimate sound depends
only on how many zeroes you want to add to the price tag. At some
point, though, practically speaking, adding two more zeros to go from
97% to 97.5% doesn't make sense...
So education is *part* of the answer. Improved server technology is
another big key. Servers have to get better and working *with* users,
and guiding them out of traps and wrong behaviors, and nudging them in
the right direction, and feeding them *directed* help. Simply blatting
out a 10K help/FAQ file every time they throw a syntax error doesn't
solve the problem. Sending them one paragraph on what they did wrong,
how it ought to be done, and where to get more detail is, because it's
a *lot* more likely to be read.
I'll cover the "what can AOL do" in a different message, beacuse I'm
still mulling that over, but there are things that the service
providers can do to help improve user education and their own user
experience (and it may be some stuff as simple as better publicizing
existing programs, or making certain documentation easier to find), but
those of us who run these things have to realize that we're no longer
catering to technologically sophisticated users, and we need to improve
our systems as well. My current list server system (and documentation)
worked great 18 months ago when I implemented it. It hasn't fallen
apart -- but the needs of the users *have* changed significantly, and
so areas that used to not be a problem now are. Fault of the system?
The user? It's not the system's fault the users have changed and are
less technically aware. it is, however, the fault of the system that it
hasn't adapted to this....
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
<http://www.solutions.apple.com/>
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com) <http://www.plaidworks.com/>
(<http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/> +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
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