Developer communication

Feedback
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Dear Suedkiez,
I get your slant. Now, I think I’m a pretty smart guy because of what I’ve studied and accomplished. And on the bell curve of people who use software and rely on “user friendliness”, you and Dan are in those stratospheric quartiles. Me? Lower middle—yet through persistence and logic do just ok. But many Americans have challenged comprehension or just a high school education. I had an uncle from Italy who never learned to read or write. He didn’t get a drivers license because of that. Through gumption he did well in life. Enjoyed being with him and never looked down on him.
The most brilliant of minds can (and did) speak to the most common among us ie. Richard Feynman, Caltech.

I’ve paid my dues in multiple careers and highly specialized vocabulary. Have zero interest in geek literacy or reading the minds of software developers.

So this long winded soapbox expresses my wish that those developers socialize with the blue collar customers and gain some insight on the broad customer base.

It’s one thing to be correct, another to imply that you might be deleting your music. What sliver of people have fancy stereo systems, fancy stereo systems and vacation homes and know what different cores are? It wasn’t that long ago I thought a core was the interior of an apple or abdominal muscles. So I feel truly sorry that ordinary people throw up their hands in frustration because they can’t invest the time divided with kids or two jobs. And all the black mysterious boxes encapsulating miles of trace and surface mount technology pulsing with code end up in landfills because a welder and a software guy couldn’t share common language.

Please take this in the best possible light with absolutely no criticism of you! It is a long winded expression for a better world and to raise the bar for communication and inclusion.

Dan reached out to me and I want you all to send positive energy his way on my behalf!

In fact my experience here has been very welcoming.
I have a hunch this will be resolved soon. I’ll let you know.

Peace, love, beauty,
Doug

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That’s all good points and ideas. I personally agree that the message above could be more clear by adding “… you will temporarily not be able to access the music on this core while you select a different one”. Or something. But I guarantee that someone will be confused by this as well.

I can tell you that in the software we produce in our company we have some error messages that we revised several times over 20 years in various ways including more succinct versions and longer versions with more explanations, and however clear you make it, someone will not get it. It’s a statistical certainty once you have a high number of users.

We produce highly specialized software and our customers are all very smart people. Nevertheless, sometimes they are stressed, distracted, simply not familiar with a concept, or whatever.

Sometimes it’s hard to get yourself into the mind of a user, and then we ask lay people to read a bunch of versions and they all agree that a message is perfectly clear. Nevertheless there are complaints later.

If it’s short and to the point someone does not understand. If we revise it and explain the issue in more detail, someone writes in to say that it’s too long and they didn’t read it or so many words are confusing anyway.

We have one message that can pop up after the user does a specific thing and says “This operation was prohibited by the configuration of a security tool on your computer, which does not allow (XY). Please contact your company’s IT helpdesk to resolve this” and we have some user asking what they should do every week.

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Dear Suedkiez,
Not trying to get the last word because I like the dialog. Terrific meeting of the minds with Dan.

Stats are your friend. Identify outliers from demographic profiles. Tutorials, please. I’ll say it again, tutorials please. At least then a person willing to work their own way out of a problem only impinges on a specialist’s time once they hit that brick wall. You are right to run phraseology past a panel of real people. Get some feedback surrounding sticking points or lack of clarity. Call that error analysis. It was a joke back in the day when that little Microsoft animation of a paper clip could be made to hover over something confusing and give a blurb about it…but, I used it more than once when I was stuck. Undo keys—yes! Restore to default keys—yes! Query messages like “Are you sure you want to delete all your music playlists? y/n.

Months ago, I had multiple pages of technical notes in the fabrication of a telescope primary lens. When shifting paragraphs of text I blew right through some headings at the top of pages. Those were the identifiers in iPad notes. How does one find something that has no ID? I found out the hard way! You don’t. But I sure wasted many man hours on my nickel and that of Apple tech.s trying to solve the impossible riddle. Since then I’ve gone to paper and pencil. I know, crude. My wife and son are serious mathematicians but in my workshop, I’m done with an operation by folding a template in half to bisect it while they are measuring, converting fractions to decimals, dividing and rounding to three places, transferring that back onto the piece. Anyway the point is to look ahead to possible outcomes and simplify. In the cockpit, knobs on the panel are shaped like their function. Throttle: push/pull flat disk. Carb heat: round. Gear up or down: like a wheel. Flaps: like a flat paddle. So, in an emergency without interior lights, things can be done quickly with little thought.
In a perfect world software should be more like that.

If Innuos gets back to me I might get to suggest that in their information releases they include a date on the page. Kept reading for clues on relevance. Clueless me.

In tech. support if there were tiers of specialists with user direct access. Move up the ladder as difficulty to resolve increased.

Last thing. A glossary. ie., UPnp, LAN, nuc, core, endpoint, adc, unison, mesh, aes/ebu, IPA (now we’re talkin’)

Gobbling up bandwidth,
Doug

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This [was] a Support thread. That means, Roon @support will get to it as soon as they can during the work week. Please save the chit-chat and resumes for [this Feedback thread] and keep [the Support] thread as clean as possible for Roon support to try to understand the crux of the problem. Thanks.

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The trigger of this little exchange was confusion whether the situation on this screen would lead to a complete inability “to access the music you had before” and whether the message conveyed the actual result (just not accessible temporarily while this core is deactivated) in a way that wouldn’t scare the user.

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All this is well and good, but it’s clear that the Roon guys are experts on digital music manipulation, and perhaps not so hot on user interface design. Horses for courses. It’s difficult for expert on something (like computers and distributed systems) to sometimes see how hard it can be for a civilian.

So… temper your expectations.

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:100: Agree. Shouldn’t be another job? Communications or something like that… For sure I would be scared of the “you won’t be able to access the music you had before”

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It is. Devs come up with initial error messages, but PMs need to vet everything that is customer-facing. Besides being user-friendly, there’s a lot of politics involved.

In this particular case, I guess it doesn’t take too much imagination to imply the files will be deleted or held for ransom or something along those lines. The message should be clear that local files will be safe, but just about everything else may go away. Still a big deal for some people.

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But nothing will actually go away, it just remains on the core that is going to be Unauthorized. Some people have two cores. It could do with more explanation on that screen but it’s not an entirely simple concept to explain without going into much detail that will also scare people just by its existence

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One tiny vote for detail. aka “lay it on me”. Knowledge is power (truism)

One reason people get colonoscopies—-not pleasant, maybe scary, come away with knowledge.

Just have to have a common language vs “insider speak”.

Shall I go into the weeds to figure out what Devs, PMs, & Unauthorized cores are??

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Vital knowledge I should add.

Not needed for dev/PM, but I included them anyway:

  • Dev: developer, i.e. person who designs and writes code
  • PM: program manager, i.e. person who gathers and documents code requirements
  • Unauthorized core: a Roon core that was authorized (i.e. active) at some point in time and is not active anymore after another core was authorized for the same Roon subscription. For each Roon subscription, there can be any number for unauthorized cores, but only one authorized core, i.e. the only one that can be used by clients. Any unauthorized core can be re-authorized.
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Dear Marian,
My software issue is 98% resolved. So thanks for the gentle nudges
you gave at key junctures!

Regarding cores: I’m still in the dark as to why those screens and choices even came to the fore. I didn’t ask the experts…didn’t want to muddy up the progress we were making. BUT, when the Innuos was initially configured only two endpoints were there— streamer (Innuos) and what I’ve come to learn—is called the “client”, the iPad and app…
Straight line, yes? Simple, yes? That’s exactly how I like things—straight line, simple and because of that philosophy easier to diagnose/fix.
Sure don’t understand how that got so mysteriously complicated by core choices and unauthorized this and that. It SURE didn’t come from my input!!

Channeling an Einstein brain through a Richard Feynman solution might look like a generated block diagram (with pull down descriptors)
showing the specific configuration and a “you are here” arrow at the blockage or decision point. Roon wouldn’t have to hire 6 more tech. people to deal with the seeming multitude of problems out there.

If you can shed some light on this, it would make me glow.

Gosh I almost signed off with something snarky. Residual angst I guess. Sorry.

Regards,
Doug