Welcome to my first blog posting not related to the setup and configuration of WordPress. While I really want to concentrate on getting WordPress up and running the way I like it, I don’t want to avoid those events that are part of the purpose of setting up a blog.
Side note: There will be some forthcoming ground rules about what I will/will not blog about. Most anything that happens at work that isn’t publicly in the news won’t be posted; however, since there’s no confidential information here, I believe it falls in the exception category.
With that out of the way, I got an interesting e-mail at work on Friday. I asked a co-worker who was not in my immediate team if we could set some time aside to discuss some results from a past usability study. Her reply was brief, consisting of 3 sentences. The third sentence was:
Go ahead and send me an s+.
An s+? Well, looking in the “New” pane of Outlook, I see I can send a Mail, an Appointment, a Meeting Request, a Task, etc. Nothing beginning with s. Searching in Outlook Help for s+ doesn’t give me anything useful. While my first inclination is to use Google, I figure I’ll give my employer the benefit of the doubt and use Live Search with the query “s+ outlook”. After looking at the first three pages of results, I decide to go back to my trusted search engine. Not surprisingly, the results give me the link to something useful on the first page (which, coincidentally, is another blog talking about the use of s+).
The thing that gets me is that s+, which is shorthand for Schedule+, is a product that ceased development in 1997. Um, hello, 10 years ago? And people are still propagating the use of this abbreviation? Seriously, how much harder is it to write “send me a meeting request” instead of “send me an s+”? Meeting request: clear and understandable. And I just wrote it twice in this paragraph. As an added benefit, you don’t have to reach your pinky finger over to the = key while holding down the shift key. Less effort for your pinky finger, and less cognitive effort for my brain. Win win situation.
So, what did we learn? Or, in corporate lingo, what are our “key takeaways”?
- If there’s any possibility that people in your intended audience aren’t familiar with your abbreviation, it will inevitably cause more effort on the part of those users to figure out what those abbreviations mean.
- Stop using abbreviations based on products which have gone the way of the dodo. You don’t see me referring to multitasking by saying “Shh, I’m DESQviewing.”
- Live Search has a long way to go if it can’t even figure out a query that has a key piece of MicroSpeak.
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