(As he spreads his arms wide to fully expose the Bullseye painted on his chest)

I do not mean this to be confrontational but, just to get us all to rethink the age old question. What is our job? It is my belief that my job is not to make computer illiterates, literate but to make the computer illiterates productive using the computer. The goal should be that the program should be as easy as breathing is to the user. Let's face it. We can make these programs do anything. Its just time and money. I'm not saying that it's easy. It's usually a Major Pain! Users and Management don't always have the same goal, but I've found, by far, most of our users want to do a good job and when fully informed most managers don't care how you get there. If you can sell them on the $.


If you worked for the power company, would you want to assess the skills of everyone who turned on a light switch? 99% of the world has no real idea how the light comes on when they flip that switch, but that does not stop then from using it productively every day. We should shoot for the same goal. Make the programs so easy to use for the user that they feel that comfortable using it. To the point that they start seeing how to make constructive suggestions on how to make it better. They will only do that if they feel comfortable talking to the developer. Sometimes that means extra work in the code. Sometime it means group or even one on one training. By doing this we will make those users as productive as they can be and therefore increase the bottom line. If the program does not feel natural to them you will get very negative results.

1. They grow to hate their job. 
   Low moral = Low productivity
	
2. They quit. (Some times not a bad thing) 
   You loose their expertise.

3. They complain to management
   You lose you Job

In our case we have had to basically stop using menus. Most of our users have been at our company for a long time. They started using a Mainframe text based system. They did not have menus and the use of menus just confused them. I don't know why? We tried multiple iterations of them and received no positive feed back. We moved to a task oriented screen with buttons for selected task. They loved it. We end up doing a lot more screens, but the productivity of all our users is up and the few days it cost in our time is more than made up.

Just some rambling thoughts.

>I would like to assess the computer skills of the staff that use my database at work. A portion of them are still having difficultly with Windows and the mouse and some with the aspects of using a database (clicking buttons, double clicking, etc...).
>
>Can anyone point me to some resources on how to effectively determine who needs brushing up. Websites, books.... Any first hand experiences?
>
>One of the things that I am afraid of when testing everyone is that they will think there is a hidden agenda or that the test results will get to the manager or their supervisor and reflect negatively on them.