Opportunity for Usability Evaluation

[Roy S. Rapoport]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Heather wrote:
> Purpose: help establish good relations with end users by means of maintaining
>          actual working (systems on their desks | internet connectivity).
>
> Ideal:   Said systems to not crash regularly, therefore UNIX(tm) experience
>          preferred.  Freenix varieties acceptable if you have administered
>          sites with end users who are not your relatives.

That's when your trouble *start*.

At my last job, at some point, the users started complaining that the
systems weren't fast enough.  My boss, a fairly astute man, said "take it
as a compliment -- people only complain about the speed of the system when
they start taking it for granted that it's not crashing."  He was right --
when I had joined the company and our main systems were crashing every few
weeks, nobody complained about speed.

(On a somewhat related note, we thought for a while that one of the selling
points of the softphone technology from Cisco -- making local phone calls
through your PC -- was that if your PC crashed, you wouldn't be able to
bother helpdesk :) ).

-roy