[Sigia-l] Visio not usable?

[Listera]

"Chris Chandler" wrote:

> A more obvious and important (i.e. explanatory) relationship is between the
> number of people who use a product and the number of books written about it.

At amazon.com searching for "Visio" results in 106 books. Searching for,
say, iTunes results in only 6 books. I suspect there are more people using
iTunes than all the versions of Visio combined. While, obviously, these two
apps do very different things, nevertheless, the disparity is most striking,
given your users:books correlation.

One can teach *everything* there's to know about iTunes to a newbie in 50
minutes. I challenge anybody, including you, to teach everything there's to
know about Visio to newcomers in 50 minutes. Or 500 or 5,000 minutes, for
that matter.

Because Visio is complex. In Visio, you can do CAD for your next house or
design very complex network topologies, calendars, Gantt/PERT project
schedules, schemas from databases, electrical engineering diagrams... In
fact, Visio is the pure definition of the phrase "kitchen sink."

You might be saying, well, I don't have to teach all that stuff in Visio,
only what's appropriate for IAs. Well, that's whole bloody point, isn't it?
While iTunes is a wonderfully focused product with a terrific UI, Visio
tries to be everything to everyone, and fails at most. This may not be so
important to a network admin using Visio, but for people who are presumably
and professionally interested in UI, workflow, efficiency, etc., Visio is
the epitome of what not to do.

I've seen books that claim to teach complex stuff in 21 days. I've seen
books that claim to do it in 24 hours. I haven't personally seen books that
claim to teach anything more complicated than boiling water in 50 minutes.
That could be me. Because, I suspect that if something could be learned in
50 minutes, as you claim, there'd be little incentive to write a tome about
it.

Either I've learned nothing about UI/workflow design in two decades or you
haven't tried to use alternatives to Visio and PowerPoint, which you
consider paragons of ease-of-use. Either way, I'm afraid we don't have a
common ground to discuss this much further.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba