One of my (many and myriad) shortcomings as a programmer is that I suck--suuuuuuck--at user interface design. But, in the teaspoonful of user interface design I possess is the following rule of thumb: "If you can't click on it after three beers, it's too small." (Darned if I can remember where I read that, because I'd happily buy its author three beers for the insight.)
But, as we all know (or bloody well should), "distracted" isn't much of an improvement on "drunk"--which apparently applies to computing just as much as driving.
I was more or less thwapped upside the head with this lesson today. On both sides of the noodle.
In the first case, one of the power-users of "my" application managed to make a person completely drop off the application's radar by performing two steps out of sequence. In the second, one of the office's power-users broke the QA edition of the same application by deleting perfectly good files (in addition to the ones being put out to pasture).
What you need to understand is that the first power-user has literally been operating the software in question longer than I've been working on it. The second power-user doesn't normally walk on (proverbial) water so much as hovers above it (not unlike the just-decloaked Klingon Warbird in Star Trek IV).
But in both cases, what either user was being asked to do falls under what we (in software and other flavors of engineering) call "edge cases"--in other words, situations that just happened to pick today to extrude themselves out from under the short ends of the Bell curve.
Sure, you can write it off as bad luck. But the takeaway is that power-users are typically granted their (super)powers for very good reasons--the main one being that they're really busy. And, as we all know "busy," by definition, equals "easily distracted." So never assume that your users--even those who use the application month-in and month-out--can afford to give it (or any "Help" instructions) 100% of their attention 100% of the time. That way lies disaster...at least if you don't have a painless (and even more fool-proof) way to fix things.
