The Application Engineer - the engineer who has to massage the hardware engineer's mistakes and the software engineer's mistakes to make something work for the customer and convince them its exactly what they asked for. :-)
Sorry, there are no application engineers as good as end users who are unfamiliar with a device. Most of the error messages came from these because the keys and combinations do what someone doesn't know what the device knows. They drove us half crazy. The in-house auditors knew the program functions and the hardware. they were the worst application engineers.
That would be a good conversation thread. I remember once when I was working at an Apple repair shop that a university professor brought me a computer with a floppy drive with two disks inserted at the same time. The guy argued that the computer during the installation asked him to insert disk 2, it did not occur to him that he should remove disk 1 first. I agreed with him and learned that user interfaces must be more careful with the messages to the 'OSI Layer 8', the one between the chair and the keyboard.
That would be a good conversation thread. I remember once when I was working at an Apple repair shop that a university professor brought me a computer with a floppy drive with two disks inserted at the same time. The guy argued that the computer during the installation asked him to insert disk 2, it did not occur to him that he should remove disk 1 first. I agreed with him and learned that user interfaces must be more careful with the messages to the 'OSI Layer 8', the one between the chair and the keyboard.
