Nonsequittal Rumblings

Another story linked from slash dot – ‘Geek speak’ confuses net users

I’m not too surprised about this finding, but the result is still depressing and scary. People tend to form some sort of community anywhere and everywhere they go, and some type of lingo starts to form. IT is very notorious about that. All kinds of new technologies are born everyday, both good and bad. Along with them, new lingoes pop up.

I hear it at my work place all the time too. Answer the customer questions using the terms that we have gotten accustomed to. We know exactly what we mean, because we face the technology everyday. To end user, that may not be the case. What might sounds like a common sense term is not common at all to the customer. It is difficult to provide help in the language that anyone and everyone can understand.

I also see it on AnimeSuki Forum too. People ask “I can’t play the video I downloaded. What’s wrong with it?” Someone else answers “It’s your codec. Reinstall the codec.” Most readers knows what that means, to some extent. What’s a codec? That’s a simple question. “How do I exactly go about this reinstalling?” That’s a much harder question. And often, this more complicated part is omitted from the answer, just because that’s something those people who give the answer do all the time. It’s a common knowledge to them. But to the person who asked the question, this “how to” is what they really want to know… most of the time.

But hey, there are plenty of FAQs and README and manuals out there. So we say RTFM!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 8:52 pm and is filed under In the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.