Had an interesting discussion with the techs last week. The end users are complaining about "data entry speed" for their "heads down typing". Now, the techs have worked in multiple organizations, and have a pretty strong, generic, and correct definition of what constitutes "heads down typing" - data entry at a much higher rate than our user base experiences. Still, when the user tells you they are doing "heads down typing", the correct answer is _not_ to disagree on the definition, but try to figure out a bit more specifically what the issue is.

The operations group does terrific process documentation here, but like all organizations, nobody loves doing it. Most of the time, you can tell these authors get up a head of steam and do great levels of detail in the beginning, and less later. the document we reviewed last week started out with "Remove PC from box, plug in cables, power on", etc., but by the end the process steps were getting terse and unhelpful ("Apply VBA Patch"). Key things to think about when documenting - understand your audience (don't write above or below them), and keep things consistent.

Another vendor, another minor peeve. A Sarbox collaboration / document management tool whose demo focused on software features like check in/out, publishing, etc. but did not relate the features to business process or benefit. And please, don't talk to me about intuitive user interface - their are too many variables and too many interesting users out there to make any one interface totally intuitive.

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Random Thoughts from Last Week - More vendor stuff