Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!rochester!fulk
From: fulk@cs.rochester.edu (Mark Fulk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: America Online
Message-ID: <1989Dec11.165834.7605@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 11 Dec 89 16:58:34 GMT
References: <1989Dec9.170635.22759@cs.rochester.edu> <24891@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: fulk@cs.rochester.edu (Mark Fulk)
Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department
Lines: 67

Once again, the AO people on this net have completely missed the point.

I have been fairly polite in the past, but I am getting tired of this,
and will allow myself to flame a bit here.  Incidentally, I wouldn't bother
if I though that AO was a bad service; I'd just unsubscribe and forget it.
I LIKE the service, but I get consistently irritated at some of its
misfeatures.  I've put a couple of hours of 

Consider that I am an AO user, having spent about three hours on it; I am a
computer scientist who has been WORKING (not just taking classes) in the
field since 1969, when I was 17, and have adapted to several dozen different
(and often weird) systems in the past (list on demand).  In short, I am not
a naive person, especially when it comes to user interfaces.  Furthermore,
caching, which seems to have been a brand new word to you all, has been a
current concept in computer science since Alan Turing.

You missed the point.  It's hard for me to believe that anyone could miss
such a simple point, but you did.  You seem to have wired somewhere into your
brains a simple model of how people will use your system.  It doesn't fit me,
and I bet it won't fit a lot of other people.  All of your responses are aimed
at someone who works like your model: someone who logs on to use one or two
services, without a lot of switching around, or uses the service very
frequently, and doesn't mind typing keywords.

Consider: the most frequent complaint that people have about AO (oft repeated
right here in comp.sys.mac by other people than me) is that it is SLOW.
This complaint has been acknowledged by AO management, which is promising
more computers and other upgrades to speed up the service.  The
"America Online Update" by some executive vice president of AO spends
several paragraphs on just this issue.  Now anyone with more than a smidgen
of background in computer user interfaces knows that people don't complain much
about the speed of operations they EXPECT to be slow; so people won't complain
about the speed of downloading files or of downloading a long news article
as often as they will about accessing a menu.  People are also willing to
put up with a limited number of long waits; most things have to be fast
or they will complain, but the speed of an occasional slow thing is not
crucial.  This is all basic user interface knowledge, reported in the all the
usual human factors literature, with an occasional survey in Communications
of the ACM, and confirmed by tons of experience of lots of people.  Telling
people that they are "spoiled by the Mac" is not only offensive and
ineffective, it is also very much beside the point.

So what solution suggests itself?  Storing the menus on the user's Mac
is clearly needed.  You want to make updating changes transparent, so
some sort of modification-date driven caching scheme is clearly necessary.
If you don't get understand the argument, retake (or take for the first time)
the undergraduate course in computer organization.

Now the flames will get especially hot:

I am sick of reading replies to articles by people who clearly didn't read
the entire article.  The last posting by an AOer repeated claims that had
clearly been addressed in the article he replied to; he, of course, failed
to include those parts.  I am also sick of being told that my problem is that
I am not just like you, and if I would just see the light and start behaving
like you want me to, everything would be just hunky-dory.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE.  One of your users just gave you very explicit
and clear instructions on how to make your service more usable to him.  It's
a good bet, especially given the complaints that people make about speed, that
a bunch of other people would appreciate the changes.  They are not even hard
changes to make.  And your consistent response is to tell this guy to jump
in a lake, he doesn't understand your system, he should be doing things your
way, etc. etc.  Don't you see how offensive you have been?  Didn't anyone
tell you how to deal with a customer?

Mark Fulk