>>>> ... WISINWIW - What I See Is Not What I Want :)))
>>>
>>>LOL! That is a great acronym! Fits a lot of my users here.
>>>
>>>WIAFINWITIWG -- What I asked for is not what I thought I would get -- is fairly popular around here, also.
>>
>>Hi Mark,
>>
>>ROFL
>>
>>It's pretty popular everywhere, from what I know. Of course, I try to eliminate some of this by discouraging users from trying to design the interface. Basically, and AFAIK this is a common practice, I get with them to work up what the report output looks like and work backwards from there.
>>
>>BTW, I think your acronym misses the being the longest ever used here by 3 characters. Still, I think it's probably the second longest.:-)
>
>Ya know we could write a very humorous book on all our experiences with end-users. But it would probably not sell because the only ones that would appreciate it would be all of us developers, geeks, and computer nerds. Ellen (elsewhere on this particular thread) hit me with a good one as well with her "WinZip is beyond the abilities of most of my users...." quip.

Yeah, I saw that one (good one, Ellen). I don't know how humorous the book would be, however. Might bring up bad memories of dealing with users. Fortunately, being a corporate developer (with captive users) and seeing as how I have to deploy applications to multiple facilities, I don't run into too much of the, "Well, I want a push button here, and a check box there..." kind of stuff (when most of the time that's exactly not how to do it). I do, however, try to follow the Windows interface guidelines as closely as possible, so I rarely get the feedback that something isn't intuitive.

When someone does try to design the application interface for me (and is going about it wrong), I usually say something like, "Since you're trying to do my job, do you want me to try to do your's?" with a big grin on my face. That usually gets the point across.