The Soft Interface
This is adapted from a conversation between myself and a person I know
in the USA on software, interfaces and Linux. Since I'd been having this
argument with Hugh recently, I found the confluence of the two arguments
enough to blog about.
In his last two paragraphs, he starts by observing "...I see no problem with striving to make the computer something that a person could use with the same amount of acumen they bring to using an oven or driving a car." He observes that this is a universal desire in the software industry, and finishes by saying that we shouldn't "have to understand the handshake protocols that underlie their cellular phone's tech to make a call." He then observes that he would be happy to use any other OS, "but [...] I'm not prepared to restock my shelves with new software that I don't know how to use or that promises functionality it cannot deliver."
I think it interesting that you talk in one paragraph about making it easy to use computers, and in another about not knowing how to use new software. What I think you demonstrate here is that fundamental problem: there is no such thing as the 'intuitive' interface. There are plenty of people who can't operate anything more than the basic functions of their oven, car, mobile phone or TV set; likewise, there is little or no standardisation of functionality in the interfaces of most of those things. The car may have the most standardised basic interface of all the devices we use regularly, but beyond steering and making it go and stop the interface possibilities are endless. How do you start it? How do you wash the windscreen? Turn off the radio? The lads at Top Gear often demonstrate these badly-designed interfaces brilliantly - one of my favourites was when they got their mothers to review some small cars, and one of the events was to open the windows, set the airconditioning on, and tune the radio to channel 4: all things that you'd want to do but often turned out to be maddeningly difficult for these ordinary people to master.
The real truth of it is that there is no standard interface - nor is one a good idea, for there's no standard human being or human brain. The only real constant thing is change, and because of this we have to teach people to adapt and change. Here, I argue that design standards such as Apple's HUI guidelines actually do as much harm as good - as soon as you take a Mac user away from their beloved interface and plonk them in front of the most popular operating system on the market today (Windows XP) they're suddenly out of their depth. My dad encountered a web page that had a link that he needed to use in grey text, and since on his Mac grey text in a menu environment has always indicated an option that was not available, he never thought of trying to click on it. This is not adaptability: this is an in-bred, forced monoculture that removes the person's ability to change and learn.
The problem is closer than you think. You can't buy a copy of Flash 5 any more, and in the upgrading and changing Macromedia and Adobe have removed functions that people use; the Chapman brothers who produce homestarrunner.com use Flash 5 simply because it does some things better than the current incarnations of Flash. So Adobe has removed functionality that worked for people. Pick up a copy of Photoshop CS and it doesn't do things in the same way that Photoshop 3 used to. You'd think that Microsoft would have kept Word the same, but no - they've changed the way things are pasted in Word 2007 that make it substantially different to the previous versions; and that's something that people use almost every single day! So complaining about "software that [you] don't know how to use" is hardly a reason to stick with your proprietary software. Realistically, you're better to learn what you can do with the various software packages available, and try to adapt and change.
Sure, some standardisation is necessary. Just don't fool yourself
into thinking that what you're used to is the One True Way.
posted at: 16:16 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
Go team legs!
I had a really good day yesterday. I decided to put the money my Mum had
sent me for my Birthday on a day pass at Perisher, since I'm unlikely to
be able to get to any of the rest of the season due to trips abroad. I
went with Rob, Kate's brother, who's a snowboarder; so I had to hang
around for half a minute while he re-strapped his boots into the board.
Since he (for most of the day) would have to wait a minute for me to
make my rather cautious way to the bottom of the slope, I didn't make a
point of it :-)
Going to the snow during the week is a great idea - the crowds are almost absent. Apart from one keen Sydneysider who was taking advantage of the APEC summit to come snowboarding, it was pretty much just the people who were holidaying at Perisher who were there. Since about half of them were in ski lessons for the better part of the day, and we were on the Towers run on Mt. Perisher (a blue run normally not encountered by all but the most advanced of learner groups), we really only encountered the few who were capable, confident and determined.
It also gave me a really good chance to get a long time to talk with Rob, and since we're both people that like thinking about life, the universe and everything and discussing ideas, we talked for most of the day on everything from why CEOs, celebrities and national leaders should be forced to spend time outside their cossetted, five-star, divorced-from-reality lifestyle and actually do jail time or meet real people who might actually tell them what the real world was doing, the tactics of dealing with emotional doomsday devices, the problems of investing ethically, how to use software and more. A good bonding session.
Rob also gave me lots of good tips on how to ski correctly, since his wife Julie is a ski instructor and they've been teaching their two girls to ski. I tried, and in the end I think I regained the basics of the Stem Christie turn, but still wasn't getting the lift on the turn and the rotation of the knees that carving uses. By the end of the day I was able to almost keep up with Rob, and was really getting a feel for it again. Alas, I probably won't get another chance to ski until next year; however, my brother and his partner are planning to come down for a week or more to do some skiing so I'm already looking forward to that!
And despite my knees feeling pretty sore yesterday (due to my bad
technique), there's almost no soreness or pain in my legs today. Go me!
posted at: 13:28 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.