XYplorer Beta Club

Am new to program but have one small suggestion. Menu item "User" isn't clear what it does. Stuff about me the user? It would be more consistant with the Help and other referances if it were "UDC's". After all the very first item on it comes up "Manage User Defined Commands".

Hi and welcome to the XY forums!

It's very helpful to get input from brand new users as they have a totally different view of things than we do...so please add more input here!

How about "UserDefCmds" as an alternate idea? Because "UDC" is a going a bit too far and is somewhat too vague, I think...and it has to be one continuous word (AFAIK)...

Don, can there be any separators? Like "User-Def-Cmds"?

j_c_hallgren wrote:How about "UserDefCmds" .... "User-Def-Cmds"?

Ewwww! These would look incredibly bad on the main menu!

j_c_hallgren wrote:"UDC" is a going a bit too far and is somewhat too vague, I think...

Given all the references that call it UDC, it might not be that bad. The problem is without exploring the feature or help, "User" and "UDC" are equally non-descriptive.

Once exploring I think it's clearer (but not by much) to understand why "User" is used. With UDC, the user has to pay attention to the title of the Manage UDC dialog, and make the connection to the acronym. After playing a bit the user is likely to be at worst slightly confused by the choice of "User" or still completely lost with "UDC".

The advantage to "UDC" is that it's much more frequently used in the docs and forums when discussing the feature, but until the user reads the docs it will still be unclear.


Given "User" or "UDC", I'd have to say "User" is still more appropriate. In some respects it might be better to rebrand UDC as Macros but perhaps more people would be confused by the lack of stringing together multiple commands?

squarerootofminusone wrote:Am new to program but have one small suggestion. Menu item "User" isn't clear what it does. Stuff about me the user? It would be more consistant with the Help and other referances if it were "UDC's". After all the very first item on it comes up "Manage User Defined Commands".

Main menu captions are generally extremely broad tags for what is actually found in the menu. I think the main criteria of choice are that they (1) look different enough from each other to help orientation, (2) similar enough to each other to generate an overall consistent impression, and (3) have a vague semantic relation to the content of the menu. "User" does the job well enough.

Thanks anyway, and welcome!
Don

TheQwerty wrote:

j_c_hallgren wrote:How about "UserDefCmds" .... "User-Def-Cmds"?

Ewwww! These would look incredibly bad on the main menu!

Hey, just throwing out some ideas!

So...I looked at x2...in it, UDC's are a "Pro" feature and I don't have that vers but it's available via "User Commands" submenu to main menu "Customize"...hummm...what if:

We adopted a similar main menu item "Customize" and then also moved some of the "Tools" items to it? Because x2's Tools menu only includes those items that more deal with doing something to PC rather than x2 itself...like for XY, that would be Recycle Bin and Network map stuff.

Not that I'm trying to imitate x2 but having some similar items might help those moving to XY from it.

TheQwerty wrote:Once exploring I think it's clearer (but not by much) to understand why "User" is used. With UDC, the user has to pay attention to the title of the Manage UDC dialog, and make the connection to the acronym. After playing a bit the user is likely to be at worst slightly confused by the choice of "User" or still completely lost with "UDC".

Excuse please, but UDC is not an acronym but a series of letters. To quality it would have to be a word which by direct implication is pronounceable. Vocalizing UDC and it comes out as an unpleasant epithet.

Having now taken off my pendant's hat, neither User nor UCD exactly gives one "warm fuzzies".

Thanks folks, but spare your time. I'm certainly not going to change a main menu caption anytime soon.

And that's fine...just having a brand new user POV sometimes brings attention to things that we may not think of, and which could affect the experience of that brand new user...and if a new user gets confused and we could help that at some point by a minor change, that's the key.

aurumdigitus wrote:Excuse please, but UDC is not an acronym but a series of letters.

UDC = User Defined Commands

so... according to the definition of acronym UDC qualifies as one:

Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name.

Or am i not getting something here?

Pagat wrote:Or am i not getting something here?

Most definitions state that an acronym is "a word" made out of the letters, blah blah. Udc is not a word, so pedantically it is not an acronym, but rather an abbreviation.

Returning to my original supposition, UDC is a series of letters. In colloquial English an abbreviation is ordinarily indicated by the use of a period. There are exceptions of course. This being 9/11 USA leaps to mind.