response 75 of 76:

Nov 23 15:08 UTC 1995

It's been a while, so I'm afraid I can't quote specific studies.  You
are welcome to study the literature if you please.  I recall one
specific study where the researchers created a dumb single-letter editor
and compared mnemonic vs. non-mnemonic letter combinations.  At one
point, I think I remember asking someone who ran an RBBS system how many
people switched from novice to expert mode, and learned that the
percentage was actually quite small.  I have also watched people use
wordstar (it had a deselectable help menu, which not many people
disable).  Minnesota had an organization (MECC?  Minn. educational
computing consortium?) which also publicized a fair amount of user
interface guidelines, which I think may have been in part based on their
experience with PLATO, as well with the PC's available at that time
(pet's, C-64's.  Things that go clunk in the middle of the night).  I've
also had the opportunity to watch people spend many years experimenting
with PicoSpan's macro & display capability, which provides quite a bit
of room for customization, both on an individual and on a system wide
basis.  Also, right here on grex, we have people coming in through at
least 3 or 4 different ways, menu, bbs, etc. - we could certainly come
up with some interesting data on which way they come in, vs., whether
they stick and what they use 6 months later.

You are perfectly welcome to disagree with me.  If you find a
substantial study that seriously disagrees with any of my understanding
about user interface, I am, in fact, quite eager to read it.  However, I
have in fact spent a fair amount of time researching this, so I will be
quite surprised if you can in fact find such a study, so I don't
actually seriously expect you'll be able to change my mind.

The newuser information is used for a variety of purposes.  Rebuilding
user files is only one of them.  At one point, I made a study of where
users were coming from, broken down country by country.  My actual
incentive had nothing to do with grex, actually, I just wanted a good
source of "freeform" foreign addresses for research purposes.  But as a
useful byproduct, I was able to produce a country by country breakdown
of grex users, which I know had some interesting surprises (japan &
france, for instance, were considerably under-represented while
singapore was over-represented.)  The computer information today is not
so useful - but 10 years ago, people had a much more interesting mixture
of C-64's, Pet's, vt-100's, & other Stuff.  We will, in fact, attempt to
use address, telephone or other information to verify users if they lose
a password, if we can do so in a secure fashion.  We encourage users to
share .plan's if possible (and many choose to do so once they've become
more comfortable with the system) - so the newuser information isn't
just for secret staffish type reasons, it's in many cases a resource
everyone on the system has, and a means for people to introduce
themselves to other people with similar interests on the system.

The sorts of people who breeze by the newuser info, are nearly always
the people who also are computer savvy enough to skip or lie to the
other questions in newuser.  They probably aren't really new people at
all.  The other class of people who don't read are those that have
somebody else watching them over their shoulder, or worse yet, running
newuser on their behalf.  Unfortunately, that's human nature, so I doubt
there's much we can do about it.  I am constantly amazed as how
carefully many people read all that stuff in newuser.  For instance,
there's one measly paragraph in there that asks people to tell staff if
they no longer want their grex account, so that we can recycle it.  We
get an impressive stream of people who very politely do just this.
(certainly not a majority of the accounts we reap, but nevertheless,
still impressive.)