One of the most common responses to my instruction is: how do you know this!
Now, I’m not a software developer, but I am a design and planning thinker, and besides a healthy dose of experience–*cough-cough* necessitated trial-and-error *cough-cough*–I think it’s helpful to trust that the person who designed what you’re using put what you commonly want fairly close by.
We like the sleek, simplified look, but also want to have all the tools we might possibly want there when we want them. The solution to your “how do I…” woes is often in one of the following ways to find more options:
- Three lines (at top left or right)
- Three dots (at top left or right)
- Left arrow to go back to the previous screen (usually at top left)
- On a computer: right click (the options depend on where the cursor is located)
So many people I work with feel dumb for not knowing or remembering to use one of these features, but I’ve seen pretty much everyone pause to think (sometimes for a while) when they need to find options. I attribute it to adapting to screen-logic, or moving between screen-logic and physical-logic.
What do you think?
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 