[drupal-docs] Making a case for usable words

[Kieran Lal]

On May 10, 2005, at 12:50 PM, Boris Mann wrote:
>>               I made the mistake of trying to change one of the most
>> cherished words used in our open source community.   Not surprisingly
>> my effort went down in flames.
>>
>
> I hope you didn't consider our feedback "flaming" you.

I didn't feel flamed.  I just felt my approach went down in flames  
but because I didn't do any homework.

> In any case, we'll be interested in any responses you gather from  
> the FLOSS usability list. Thanks for continuing that discussion.

Yeah, I realized that tackling a single word is a bad to approach.  A  
much better approach would be to do some sort of holistic examination  
of terms and then identify what the most confusing terms are.

One approach that come to mind is a cognitive walkthroughs.  There is  
not a lot of scientific validity to this exercise but basically you  
let a user ramble what they are thinking about when reading  
documentation or conducting a task.

I had one person say they loved the term application because that's  
the term people in the non-profit world think of when talking about  
these 'modules'.    Matt Mullenweg, the leader of WordPress wanted to  
know what word I had used.

I'll write up a summary in a couple of days when the thread settles  
down.  You can follow along here:
http://www.flossusability.org/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi? 
a=sprint&i=47D15090-DACE-4244-ADB2-C86EED3F4DBC at civicspacelabs.org

Cheers,
Kieran