The Jonathan Livingston Seagulls of CrossLoop

This weekend I just finished reading the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and it hit me that most of you, our users, are very similar to Jonathan described in Part III of the book.

Many of you are teaching or helping your family - freeing them from the very same technology that should be empowering them. You are helping - parents, grand parents, in-laws, senior citizens and distant relatives, customers - and many of them live in far off places.

Here are some of the stories that express that analogy better than me:
 
Mike: During my Christmas visit, I installed Crossloop on both my mother’s and my father-in-law’s PCs.  The day after I returned home to Alabama my father-in-law called me to say that he’d lost his “folder view” in Outlook Express.  Crossloop made it possible for me to not only fix the problem, but to also show him how to “show and hide” the OE “folder view”.  Even if the student is aged 75+, I can still “teach a man to fish” instead of just “giving him a fish” using Crossloop.

Benson John: This is a fabulous piece of software that you've developed. I am an Indian student currently in Melbourne, Australia & this tool helps me immensely to troubleshoot PC problems for my folks back home in India.

Henk (paraphrased to make it short): I am a helper in a Computerclub for senior citizens in the city of Amstelveen (www.ascc.nl ) in the Netherlands. Our club has over 400 members (!!) of whom many are not very good on the computer and we are running a helpsystem visiting them at home. It is simple to manage and to explain the program to other. Thanks to CrossLoop we are able to assist less computer-experienced seniors. Once a month we have a clubmeeting (with about 80 members) explaining working with the computer. I demonstrated the working of CrossLoop. I worked on another computer communicating through Skype. It worked excellent and all members were very enthusiastic. Together with Skype we have an excellent possibillity for computerhelp.

I have more such inspiring stories that I will share over time but I did want to recognize all the Jonathans out there - it means and says a lot in this busy and tired world! May be it is time to categorize then as "Jonathan Stories" rather than "User Stories"

Good Evening and Good Luck

PS: I strongly recommend this book. It is quick enough to read and work at a startup :)

Comments

[UI Guy]

I ran across a business week article on effective small business technologies and found you guys! Just want to say that the technology is great, and I too will be using this to help my Dad who is currently overseas with a tech help issue.

Additionally, I want to add that as a UI designer, I really like the: Help and Be Helped graphic on your home page. Unfortunately, this just isn't done meaningfully with many other application sites. Not only is your graphic simplistic but the visual communicates exceptionally well for first time visitors!