trap_jaw,

I can only say that most of these issues have come up recently (last 2 weeks) in the support forum. Personally, I think a large documentation, esp. for a simple app is a sign of a badly designed app (not techically, but from a human factors p.o.v), but I realize that this is a hard point to argue than I thought.

If you research a bit about human factors, you will realize that the notion that users read manuals is one of the hardest to kill misconceptions of programmers and engineers. They don't. This issue comes up every single time a company employs human factors people to check their software. They find a cumbersome interface issue, and the engineer will reply that, well, it's all documented in the manual. It's fan users like the people posting in this thread that maybe bother maybe read the manuals. Not the average users. Particularly if they can switch to other apps, or bother the forum for support.

There are a few users every day who keep asking the same questions in the forums. It's not like there is somebody with good advice there 24/7. Some of these users give up and use other vendor's applications. If we could take care of some of these issues with interface improvements, that would make everybody's life a lot easier.

Let me give one example: When users start up limewire, they have no indication whatsoever that limewire is doing anything. If limewire doesn't connect, they have a red dot and a greyed dot as sole indicators. No text. They have to go to the connections tab to figure out in the first place whether limewire is at least attempting to find hosts. Why can't limewire clearly communicate it's connection status on the tab that shows when you open the program (search). Like:

a) can't reach the internet (with suggestions to check router/firewalls/etc)
b) connecting/waiting for good hosts

and once the light goes green

c) connected behind router/firewall (suggestion to forward port)
d) connected and everything running well

I know you can find these things out by looking elsewhere if you know what you're doing but a novice user maybe doesn't think of checking the 'connections' tab. If I remember correctly, the 'connections' tab is even hidden by default. Is that again information that's irrelevant to users?