Originally posted by koganam
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What about the customer who writes to you: "I am not educated enough to be able to explain the words that you do not understand, by stating how to physically do what I am asking!" 
No kidding. That is a pretty clear paraphrase of what one customer said to me when I said he should describe physically what he does when he is doing a so-called "2-bar trail". Of course, I had an idea what he meant, but he had been so muddled in his thinking all along, that I wanted to be sure that he was describing what he meant, and that it matched what I thought that it meant.
No kidding. That is a pretty clear paraphrase of what one customer said to me when I said he should describe physically what he does when he is doing a so-called "2-bar trail". Of course, I had an idea what he meant, but he had been so muddled in his thinking all along, that I wanted to be sure that he was describing what he meant, and that it matched what I thought that it meant.
It comes down to the customer's ability to communicate. But, in my experience, the buck really stops with the programmer's ability to read the vague tea leaves scattered helter-skelter in the customer's "communications" of what they want.
I'd suggest having your customer do screen recordings of their trades, as well as ample use of TeamViewer to view their screen. (Skype screen sharing is not always sufficient, since sometimes you'll want to take over the mouse and point out something on their screen while you ask questions about it.)
Have them find a market replay area showing 5-15 mins of their perfect setup. Then ask them for a screen recording of them talking about what their eyeballs are watching during this setup, and make sure they provide ample commentary during the recording.
I kid you not. Get them to focus on the actions of their eyeballs. Yes, eyeballs, not their fingers, not the mouse, make them verbally describe what their eyeballs are looking at ... at every step of their setup. You can ask the why's and what-for's after you get this basic watching-over-their-shoulder screencast video.
[Edit: The point of the eyeball screen-recording exercise is to slow their minds down to make them explain verbally why they are looking at the things they are looking at. In effect, you guide them into teaching you what it is they're doing. It may take them 10 minutes to explain what they do in 10 seconds -- which, come to think of it, might be just the right ratio of audio commentary to eyeball action needed to help someone learn someone else's setups.]
It also helps, in my experience, for a customer to use (colored) pen and paper to literally draw the perfect setup, coloring in their green and red bars, adding in their CCI, EMAs, or whatever. Sounds childish, but this literally forces the customer to first depict their setup rules graphically, allowing your followup Q&A (aka, the descriptive words) to describe the graphical drawing to become a collaborative endeavor secondary to the graphical drawing.
[Edit: Also, have the customer find their perfect chart setup and take screenshots. Help the customer markup the screenshot to show what their eyeballs are looking at.]
And, yes, finally, I suppose, some people just don't have the vocabulary to describe what it is they are doing or wanting.
With those folks, what they have is a failure to communicate. At some point, you just gotta give up, wish them well, and exit the burning building as quickly and quietly as possible.
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