Slashdot Mirror
Are Computers Getting Too Easy To Use?
An unnamed correspondent writes: "The latest issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing has a paper by Bradley Dilger called The Ideology of Ease. Dilger writes that making computers "easy" may also make them less useful. 'Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,' he says." Some of the allusions seem a little stretchy (I'm not sure that Marx has much to do with user interface design) but Dilger makes an interesting case for re-thinking the motives behind some moves toward "easiness." Especially as GUIs for Linux proliferate, it makes sense to think about exactly what constitutes ease.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." John F. Kennedy
What would have happened if the Apollo 13 astronauts were using a gui wizard to (try to) get to the moon and didn't know how their spacecraft functioned or where anything was stored?
They'd have been toast.
Users ("students" from the article) are often toast because they (try to) use a computer without knowing any basic OS/hardware/software structure and functioning.
If all users had even basic knowledge of their computing environment, not only would there be much less toast in the world, but many slashdotters would be out of a job.
not_anne
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
Agreed. The first thing I do when sitting down to any machine is to disable as many of the "Helping" features as possible. Word probably has the most cluttered feature-list of any common app., and I spend more time trying to get it to do what I WANT [eg type a simple non-formatted list] and not what it has been programmed to *guess* that I want to do [automagically insert bullets, tabs, paragraphing, character spacing, underlining main points....]. I actually prefer Notepad or Wordpad, since I can insert mark-up tags - either HTML or just notes to myself on formatting - and then import to Word for final printing.
But I believe this is one of the main points of Dilger's article:
- Demystify everything. In the case of computing, explain the technologies students are using, and tell what's "under the hood" -- show students the server room, or open up a computer and identify the various parts. Use programs that give students direct control over work, instead of displacing control to "wizards" or "helpful" agents.
In the essay, the "Ideology of Ease" can be compared to the politically-charged idea of "The Welfare Effect", whereby systems (designed ostensibly to help people) become systems which cripple the Helped and foster dependence on further help.I work in a college library helping students do both print and computer-based research, and after two minutes working with a particular patron I can tell if her/his computer experience began with a CLI, a Mac, or Windows95.
[digression: this is similar to how someone with a linguistic education can pick out non-native speakers of a language by noticing very subtle clues invisible to the untrained ear. there should be some special category of occupational psych. to investigate just how important is the connection between exposure to early "non-user-friendly" computers and later skill proficiency.]
The big Flaw in the Ideology of Ease is that for computer systems it must be all or nothing. That is, since ease fosters an ignorant user-base which clicks buttons without real understanding, the system MUST be designed to NEVER deviate from the Wizard path, for, if it does stray, the dependent user has no knowledge from which to build an alternative, and then all the postulated productivity of the Digitised Workplace is eaten by befuddled downtime while waiting for the IT department to "fix my broken machine".
Somebody had to put all that Chaos there!
Yeah, and it was MS-Office.
---
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Emacs-like systems, with a built-in language for detailed operations instead of menus aren't the answer either. How many people have the time to spend learning to program in elisp? I myself have programmed computers for 25 years and still have to learn how to be productive in Emacs. I plan to learn it. Yes, I really mean it, it's the first thing I'll do in the twenty-third century.
Meanwhile, how can we make computers more productive, without making people waste time learning useless details about internal computer workings? I think Artificial Intelligence is the answer. But AI needs to reach a capacity threshold to become useful in this context. That gay paper clip is irritatingly stupid, but at least it's one step in the right direction.
after two minutes working with a particular patron I can tell if her/his computer experience began with a CLI, a Mac, or Windows95.
I can definitely believe this, but I'm curious: how do you differentiate between Mac and Windows people? What type of computers does your college library use?
cpeterso
I find it ironic that a paper on ease of use uses such unapproachable language. I found to be over-analytical and bombastic (I love self-describing words).
Not to pick on you in particular, deacent, but I was rather amused to see several people commenting on the vernacular the author demonstrated.
As I was reading it, I was thinking of how nice it was to see someone who dares push beyond the simple vocabulary we're used to encountering on network television and even in most newspapers. The "people who use big words are elitist" and general anti-literate attitude that prevails in North America disgusts me. (And you'd think that people who, in general, claim to have sufferred mild persecution for their intellect would be the last to criticize such an author.) Even if he did manage to lose a good chunk of his readership by mixing in several coined terms without defining them until a couple paragraphs later, he used the most accurate language he could find for the job. More power to him.
And don't forget that the man teaches writing. He'd very nearly look bad if he were to forego a smattering of tri-sylibic words in everything he publishes.
--
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Note that the above post, which states that computers "aren't going to get any easier to use in the future," and bemoans the goal of user friendliness, is itself, one extremely reader-unfriendly, run-on paragraph. Sadly, some people give little thought to how others will experience their work, and so their work is much less easy for others to deal with than need be.
If one does not like to deal with such "user interface" issues, one should find someone else who *is* good at such things to present one's work to a wider audience. Simply dismissing the whole issue of user friendliness just guarantees one's work an unnecessarily limited audience.
It would be more like a car maker letting you have a simple way of setting the air/fuel mixture and timing from a little panel by the stereo.
The born hacker personality, Myers-Briggs INTP, really does not need this ease of use. But INTPs are less than a percent of the population. So a solution had to be created to allow "virtual idiots" to become "virtual users", not real users. INTPs are real users and more: Network Administrators, System Administrators, and Programmer Analysts.
So have computers become too easy? It all depends on the personality of the "user". My aunt, a Myers-Briggs ESTJ, aka Anal-Retentive Psychotic, with her unhealthy detail orientation, will make up superstition whenever a wealth of details is lacking. This means she will almost always operate on a basis of confusion or falsehood. As if this were not bad enough, 13 percent of Americans are just like her. So ease-of-use features will quickly cause them to create their falsehoods in their minds, rather than learning. Once they teach themselves their falsehoods, re-education becomes nearly impossible. And...THESE IDIOTS VOTE. No sci-fi horror story can match the very real genetically borne human personality horror we face right now.
Whereas some features, like GUIs, reduce or eliminate the learning curve, and speed up work, the price for "ease of use" is being locked out of some computer functions. Windows ME no longer has a DOS prompt on the menu. This means that files not accessible through Windows Explorer are not accessible, period. If Windows never crashed, and if it did not sometimes even refuse to boot, this would not be a problem. When things go wrong, easy-to-use features for the masses are usually worthless for troubleshooting or gaining access to files for editing. This is where Linux, operated from the command line excells. DOS is also good, but with only about a tenth of the usefulness of Linux.
The ease-of-use and ease-of-access arguements are not new ones. This same war has been ongoing in the Amateur Radio community about limiting access with tougher licensing requirements. The results of dumb-down are similar: more radio operators who cannot read a schematic and have no idea what makes a radio work.
The trend toward easier use and access has resulted in a population of users increasingly unable to solve problems when systems fail. This has resulted in a sociological emergency were corporations want to amend immigration policy to get foreign workers to fill their quota of computer professionals able to troubleshoot, design and hack code. So what happens to technology for one-fifth of the worlds population after we suck the brains out of Asia? Ease-of-use does not address serious long term, and perhaps, insurmountable problems which it creates. This sociological emergency follows the biological, genetic emergency caused by a majority of ES types who multiply their numbers through reproduction and genetic inheritance while rational, intuitive types rarely reproduce. The dumb-down of access coupled with the genetic disaster of ES types may be the right-left combination punch that destroys advanced civilizations.
All I can say is that my wife who is an attorney does not understand how to save a file to some other directory or a floppy, does not understand how to detach an email attachment, uses the same software for 8 years is not interested in learning anything new and is generally untrainable when I attempt to do so. It could be the teacher I'm not the most patient person in the world but in a nutshell people generally want computers to adapt to how they work and think. They want to be able ignore file systems, most of the window controls and just about anything that isn't a direct analog of how they would work at their desk using paper, pens and folders. They want to be able to automatically archive docs everytime they're opened. They want redlining and version control that's automatic and intelligent enough to understand partial version updates, page insertions and the like. They don't want to convert a scanned TIFF image to some other format. They don't want to retrieve a file by location but instead by function. They want to bundle dissimilar file objects under a single logical work heading, again without any understanding of the file system on their part. That is, they want work folders that logically link different types of objects under the same heading. They want multiple concurrent printer support so that dissimilar work objects can be simultaneously printed w/o having to open all of the applications and with the ability to print color objects on the color printer and B/W objects on the laser printer in-stream. They want automatic archive retreival that is transparent from secondary storage so that objects not in primary storage are automatically brought forward and inserted into the original version control sequence. They want they want they want they want. It can never be easy enough.
What really took the cake, though, was this guy who came up to me and started talking about a "security issue" he had. I went over and looked at his machine -- he had fired up Netscape Mail, entered his account information, username, and password, and was concerned that "people could now read his email."
Exerting every ounce of will not to shriek "no shit!" at him, I explained that yes, if you enter your username and password into the mail program (dumbass!!!), you can, in fact, read your mail. And if you don't remove said information (which you shouldn't be entering in a lab machine anyway, shit-for-brains), yes, other people will read your mail. He didn't understand. I explained that these were lab machines and the copies of Netscape on the computers were not really for their personal use as mail readers. I might as well have been talking to the wall. I then tried to show him how to use Pine, which is what we encouraged the students to use when reading their mail, but that was akin to trying to teach brain surgery to a tree frog. He stabbed at the keys in vain for a few minutes, then left, presumably to create another "security issue" on some machine elsewhere.
My conclusion was, fuck it, if he doesn't want to learn, let people read his mail. Probably all Dilbert links, macro viruses, and Neiman Marcus cookie recipes anyway.
Of course, this was really to be expected, when even the people teaching the technology classes had not the slightest clue what in God's name they were doing. It was truly a case of the blind leading the blind.
The only real reason for moving configuration files out of nice, easy to read (and edit) text files is that it's harder to program a parser for text files than it is for a database (or binary file). Also, binary files can be faster for reading and writing (since overwriting a value in a binary file can be as easy as appending to the end and changing a pointer in the file). Changing a text file typically requires re-writing the whole file.
The Linux/Unix community could stand to gain a lot if all configuration files adopted a common format, like XML for example. Then the parsing tools already exist, and it would be easy enough to make a generic config file editor. The problem is that people don't like changing things or re-learning things. Nobody wants to reprogram sendmail so that it uses XML as a config file because Sendmail experts have mastered the syntax of the sendmail.cf file and are resistant to change.
In my experience, it's bad business.
Don't pay someone a lot of money to do something they don't have the skill set to do. You don't send a script kiddie to do a gurus job in a network, and you don't send a veepee to fix a peecee. People (unlike computing) have limited skill sets and it's important for a business to get the most out them without expending a lot of money in wasted time.
If an employee teaches themselves (on their own time) to fix their computer when something goes wrong, they'll be a more productive person. On the other hand, I don't want a board member to cancel all his client meetings for the week because he can't figure out how to print out his presentation. You get an expert in to fix the issue and move on!
Put another way:
You've got 2 employees.
Alice and Bob.
Alice spent the weekend evaluating fixed wireless conectivity for the company network and Bob spent his weekend golfing with the clients son. On Monday the client calls to close the order and the network is down. Q:Do you put Alice on the phone with a client she doesn't know and Bob in the server room trying to find the "any" key?
A:No. People gravitate toward things they like doing and build their skill sets around that choice, and a good business will let them do that.
it's really stupid to use a program which is not a programming langauge since you loose the full power of the computer.
;)
oh, you mean we should be using Microsoft Outlook?
cpeterso
Let's examine this statement, using that nearly forgotten old craft, Logic:
Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,' he says.
If is true that ease of use is directly tied to functionality so that a gain in one is offset by a loss in the other, this connection could be utilized to make phenomenal gains in functionality by decreasing ease of use!
There are complicated ways to do this, of course, but let's keep it simple. The programmer can do this by replacing all text with "x". Or the user can do it himself by just turning off the monitor. The program becomes almost impossible to use, so, if the author is right, it's functionality would skyrocket!
I didn't read the article, and maybe the author has a good point, but he lost the chance to tell it to me when he wrote that one immensly stupid line.
The problem is that the stupid GUI dose not (a) help develop a users intuition about they way the system works and (b) dose not interact well with scripting and user programming.
I agree with your basic argument, but not your (a) and (b) points.
Back in college I worked in a computer lab. People would come in and I would have to teach them to use the mouse. Amazingly, a half our later they were in Word and writing their paper. They were usually good to go until they had to figure out footnotes or page numbering. Compare this to the computer-savvy CS students that have to spend the first few weeks getting comfortable with Unix and a text editor (with a high learning curve) before they can even begin to do anything.
As for scripting, GUIs don't have to interfere. You're just stuck in the Unix shell scripting mentality. A ton of Windows applications (Office, Visio, Rat. Rose, Visual Studio, etc.) can be scripted (through COM) in very powerful ways. It's usually language independent (I occasionally use perl to automate stuff in Visual Studio).
I just noticed that I'm tending toward that ideal of only using compilers for doing productive things. I use TeX for making reports (it compiles to the `machine code' of a postscript printer). I use Fortran instead of a spread sheet. Bash for playing with the OS and scripting, metapost for making vector graphics, and the gimp, which can use scheme and perl for scripting, for bitmap graphics. Now I just need to find a slashdot-reading programing language...
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
I agree that much of the bad UI is third party. MS is responsible to a degree for that too. Windows lacks strong UI guidlines, plus MS makes enough changes to the Windows UI each release that it makes it difficult to write a sophisticated Windows app that looks NT native and Win95 native.
-Jennifer
I think it is possible to set up a system that can be both easy to use at first and powerful later on. The trick is to get the foundation of the system right. At the foundation you need something essentially akin to Unix. A wide range of powerful and flexible tools that can be linked together in powerful arrangements under some sort of linking/scripting system. Then on top of that you build up a set of friendly and easy to use tools that let people do their basic tasks. And perhaps some midrange tools that provide more complexity for users who need more power. Or give those tools an advanced mode. These tools should be crafted under the scripting/linking system.
So users start off with the friendly tools, as they grow more comfortable they switch to the advanced mode. In time they might well grow so advanced that they craft their own tools under the scripting/linking system to automate tasks that they want to be done.
Essentially it would be taking the Unix 'find' command which is powerful but not easy to use and you write a new simple GUI front end to it, with a simple mode that allows for easy selection of the starting directory and a fill in the blank approach for the -name field with the default -print modifier. And the advanced mode invokes find with a few more fancy options. The power user then starts using find directly or creates their own little button on some control panel if they need say, something that will present a window of all their log files for the day.
What you need is to encourage the creation of these tools and make it easy to link them together under the language of your choice. GNOME and KDE are taking steps in the right direction with Bonbono and KParts respectively, but sometimes I wonder if that goes far enough in some ways.
I think the author makes some very good points, but he misses a possible reason for this huge push towards 'ease of use': company profits. There are millions of computer users -- not to mention people who could afford to buy a computer but haven't -- who use a very expensive and powerful piece of machinery for only 3 or 4 tasks. This is not good for software companies, whose potential markets are severely limited because people a) don't know what can be done with their computer, and b) think more interesting things must be too complicated to learn. The easiest and fastest way for companies to draw in new customers is to create software that is easy to use without other knowledge -- like the generalized sense of how a computer functions that the author of the article mentions. Have you ever seen a software advertisement targeted at the general public that didn't say something to the effect of "so easy to use you'll be ______ in no time" (think AOL)?
In my opinion, when more people are more educated about how their computers work, the incentive for pure ease-of-use will disappear. Most customers, like current 'advanced' computer users, will be interested in powerful and elegant software, and will accept a learning curve for the sake of functionality.
Right now GNOME and KDE are the top of the heap. If you look at them from a user interface point-of-view you'll see that they are extremely similar to the point of almost being identical. They look, act, feel and play like the Win95 GUI. The reasoning behind this is that it supposedly makes them "easier" for people to use.
From the standpoint of being useful, though, they suffer from the same problem that the Win95 GUI does. It's only easy for people who have only used it. There are many other options that are actually "easier" to use and work with than GNOME or KDE. XFce/xfwm <http://www.xfce.com> is one of, and likely the best of, the non-Win95 designed GUI's. It is, in fact, the topic of one of the sessions at ALS this year.
Now, before someone gets all bent over this, I am not trashing GNOME or KDE! I am talking about the UI design, only. The point of being "easy" is the topic and how you define "easy" is the key.
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
"That isn't really a bad thing, either, until you NEED to know what's going on. "
Many on this forum I believe feel threatened by the idea that, in a properly thought out system, much of what they know about the functioning of the internals of the software and hardware, is simply a mass of details that are largely irrelevant to getting the job at hand done. Unless the job at hand is software development or harware engineering, then knowing what goes on "under the hood" really doesn't matter.
Many, many drivers haven't the foggiest clue what goes on under the hood of their cars. They only know that they need to pull into a service station when they're low on gas, or when one of the warning lights come on.
Computers can be designed the same way. Simply allow the baby level users to do simple things, but provide users with the freedom to advance to more complex working methods if and when they want to.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought the original article was very good. I scoffed at the assertion "you always make sacrifices for ease of use", but then I had trouble coming up with a counterexample; I thought NCFTP was a clear cut ease of use champ over traditional FTP, and it is-- but then going to other command line FTPs would be much more difficult, thus, "choice" *is* reduced.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
User "stupidity" is usually due to this maddening cycle: rather than explain key concepts (not even the difference between * and a regexp, I mean key concepts like files go in directories they try to hide the concept and make it unnecesary (rather than put applications on your disk in an appropriately named directory, applications go under the Start menu.) That backfires when you ned to do something not in the Start menu. But by that point, the computer and the OS has already been sold and invested in by the user. So the incentive for computer/OS makers is to sell units that appear to be useful, rather than be useful in real life.
Me, I don't care how easy and lickable the interface is, is has to come with a MANUAL that TELLS you how to DO THINGS. :-P
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
My gripe about smart menus is that the system is dynamically changing the contents of menu bars. This conflicts with the user's learned memory of the user interface. If you use a program often enough, common actions become automatic, like touch typing. Smart menus disrupt this process by moving, inserting or deleting menu items.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"The point is, that with most "hard" skills, people are aware that they must count the cost of attaining skill.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on this. I believe that many people entertain a very silly, even childish distinction between certain tasks based on how easy they *look*.
For example, a skilled *nix user looks like s/he is just typing away, no sweat, and lots of useful things get done. A skilled artist looks like s/he is just splashing paint around, and a beautiful image results.
Naive people entertain the fantasy that all they need to do is buy a computer, or some brushes, paint and canvas, and they'll soon be writing the next big 1st person shooter, or painting masterpieces. Obviously, this is not so.
Again, I think this is largely because certain tasks, once mastered, are made by those who have mastered them to *look* easy. Other tasks, like carpentry, continue to look hard and complex, even when a master carpenter performs them.
I personally leave it turned off, but I know that some of my family members like it. All things considered I think it humanizes the interface slightly. Of course, I understand how it would be really annoying for advanced users if you couldn't turn it off.
But in the future I think these things will be much more useful. Microsoft Agent extends this idea a little bit. It's fully scriptable and supports text-to-speech. Combine this with a little bit of AI, a search engine, and speech recognition and it could be pretty sweet.
Beginner users could use level 1 for the gui and programs, and as they get more comfortable with the system they naturally will increase to higher levels. On the other hand, expert users could choose the top level and have all the needed options on hand.
Just a thought.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
If you have an environment where you can program and tweak to your heart's content, you can make a one-letter command to do something which will take trained GUI monkeys many, many hours.
Thank you. This place is populated by people who threw the baby out with the bathwater when they took up command-line interfaces. Interface design is a Good Thing and it's what we should be doing; interface misdesign is what we should be fighting.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
You are always going to sacrifice ease of use for flexibility. Thats why you have a choice on what OS you want on your machine. To some people, the computer can never be too easy to use. Thats how MS made money on their OS; make it as easy as possible to use.
Im sitting on a 2000 OS right now, and its
the damn near easiest thing to use. The article is right. The more userfriendly. The less security, and stability. Its been 4 days since ive had 2000 installed as a 2ndary OS next to Linux, and its already crashed about 3 times. The GUI has given out 2 times, and 1 BSOD during install.
My server, Slackware, Linux 2.2.16. Is NOT all that easy to use since ive done most of the system building, and prog architexture myself. And the best thing is, its NEVER crashed. And i installed it about.. 1 1/2 years ago. Id have to check the uptime too, because its been up since the release of 2.2.16.
80% of the people I know can't drive a stickshift. And yet they get around, because an automatic hass all the functionality they need. The real problem is that some commercial interfaces are designed to be easy to use in the showroom where the salemen points to the Start menu or whatever, instead of having to explain key concepts ("you see, there's these files, and they go in directories....") And computer salesmen are certainly not going to point at a user manual.
Now, a TV comes with a poorly translated manual that's hard to read, but at least it tells you how to change the channel! Computers today seem to come with no such thing. Just a 6 page booklet that tells you how to turn it on and maybe find the Help button if you're lucky. Thing is, while people will read a printed manual, reading online help is an unproductive pain in the neck for most people. It's a crying shame.
"look how easy to set up our computer is! why, the manual is only 4 pages long, and it's all pictures!"
Riiight.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Man, when I started out (1973), you had to be really, really dedicated to use a computer. Everyone who used one knew how to program (ok, mostly because they didn't do much else). When I hacked into my first UNIX system (1975, one of the hundreds at Bell Labs in Holmdel), half the users didn't even have passwords. Didn't need 'em, UNIX (System III, maybe something even earlier) was just to hard to use.
Now anyone can learn a computer. My Mom knows three operatings systems (AmigaOS, MacOS, Windows). What's this world coming to? They were hard to create, they should be hard to use. In fact, most of you shouldn't be on a computer, either. I think the test should be "can I design one from scratch". In case there's no silicon FAB in your backyard, you can use FPGAs...
-Dave Haynie
Mabey all this means is we are actually starting to use common sense.
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
As computers become more mainstream and mass-market, a growing population of people who barely know more than how to turn the damned thing on will be increasingly vulnerable to exploits by the global consumerist economy.
These people will only surf the major portals, will always feel compelled to buy the latest upgrades, and won't know how to do anything more than click the "Buy!" button on a Window$ IE dialog box, whether that "Buy!" button is at amazon.com or at edshouseofpr0n.com
Fortunately, computing being what it is, there will always be a substantial ecological niche for the small, efficient omnivorous mammal, scurrying around under the plodding feet of mass-market consumers and the mass-market corporatist dinosaurs.
These small, efficient mammals are the folks who will always run the big systems, and are the people who are turned to for help when something breaks..
Let computers become "Easy-to-Use" for the mass-market consumers, it's the inevitable groundswell as consumerist culture expands into what is really just one more marketing opportunity, a marketing opportunity reached through a computer that even an idiot can use.
We'll just stay back in the shadows, tucked away safe under the bushes, and chances are they won't even notice us.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
'Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,'
Bullshit.
This may be true in a Microsoft or Apple type world, where there's only one GUI and it's the only available choice, and OS is written around the GUI, but it's complete nonsense in the rest of world.
Linux, *BSD, and Unix are built with a robust operating system designed for maximum utility, with the GUI residing in user space where it belongs, and very little done to the OS to make the GUI's job easier.
In such an architecture, you can make the GUI as "easy to use" as you want, without affecting another user's ability to "get at the guts", because he doesn't have to use your GUI.
That is why he is wrong, and that is why we will win.
-
There's a difference between using big words (which he did, but I don't have a problem with) and dry writing. I feel like he used too much uninteresting language for things that could have been said more simply. Perhaps it's my practical side talking, but I prefer to KIS when it comes to communication. It's much more effective.
Then again, language for the sake of language is something I really don't get. The draw of poetry has always eluded me. Taking into account his writing background, I guess in retrospect this could be why his style grates on me.
-Jennifer
I have always felt that the ease of use-lack of sophistication argument is most prevalent on the Internet. In the days of Usenet, gopher, BBS, and lynx the people posting were those with the know-how to post. The average quality of stuff found on the Internet was higher-it took brains to use, so posts were thought up by brains.
With the advent of the Web (A Very Good Thing) suddenly people without the knowledge of how things work and many other general skills were thrust into an arena where it was easy for them to crear nonsense and havoc. (who do you think put the chaos there?)
To quote my father when a non-tech would ask what was so good about the web- "Nothing, stay off, don't clog it for those of us who want to actually use it."
Im not saying that the Web is a bad thing, but with the ease of use comes an inevitable loss in standards of quality.
You're all thinking of computers as desktop PC's. That's not the point. A desktop PC is a swiss-army knife -- such knives can do many things, but are very clumsy to carry around. A swiss army knife has its limitations -- it's good to have on a hike, but at home I'd rather use separate tools because they are much easier to use than such a bulky and heavy tool.
The point of a tool is to make something done easier. A light-switch is a tool which helps us avoid having to put rubber gloves on and connect bare wires to have a light come on. Desktop PC's are quickly desintegrating into smaller tools which are designed for a certain purpose. A game console is designed to play games. An MP3 player is designed to play MP3's. You can do both on a desktop, but it's same as a swiss-army knife -- I want to be able to take my music to the porch with me, or to the party.
I am all for computers-tools. It's much more convenient for me to simply tap a button on my MP3 player, than do:
mount /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom/mycollection.m3u -Z
mpg123 --list
Both get the work done, but by golly, doing the latter is like live-wiring the electricity to have the lights go on.
I'd say -- let computers become tools that are easy to use, have low learning curve, and perform a specific task. I don't want to learn NTSC specs to watch a TV, why should a computer user have to learn how to mount a drive to listen to MP3's.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
... The more you play,
The less you work.
It's that simple.
So the more you get comfy,
the worse it is for your company.
I agree with everything you've said 100%. However, one thing I will say is that I think IT in general might find their energy is better spent educating the users more, rather than try to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. In other words, though I think there are lots of truth to the statement that we can "have our cake and eat it too"--taking it too far has its own dangers. You may allow the expert all the access they want and the beginner all the simplicity they need to get their immediate job done, but if the user doesn't know the right questions to ask to begin with, the odds of the user improving are slim. Thus they will perpetually do everything the hard way, or worse, not at all. It might ultimately prove more cost effective to properly educate the user as to the basics of computing.
The real costs in IT come not from the cost of shrinkwrap, but from all the support and downtime associated with ignorant users. We should attack the root of the problem, ignorance, not just the immediate stumblings.
Articles like this pop up every now and then and it amazes me every time! Sometimes I think we assume too much that we have the perfect user interface models now with command line, window based GUI's, desktop analogies and computing is divided into applications with running application instances as processes - often residing in their own windows. I'd like to see some work and ideas on radically different types of user interfaces and views on what an "application" is.
In the real world, work is typically divided into tasks. People have a hard time concentrating on more than one task at a time, which is why a task division is logical. Computers however, do not work like this, so a task division and a division into applications is not at all as clear. I like the Java idea a lot where the whole collection of objects running / "living" in the virtual machine is essentially one big application.
Recently, web based user interfaces are everywhere. This is a pretty interesting analogy because it's based on documents - almost reports. "Here is the current situation. What do you want to do? Ok.. here's the situation after you did that."
The way I see user interfaces in, say, 3-5 years, is that we have large systems of objects, be it Java, COM/DCOM, Corba or whatever, collaborating between relatively small and simple devices. There could be some in a VCR, some in a TV, some in a game console, some in a web pad, some in a cellular phone etc.. Then you have user interface consoles; cell phones and web pads for instance, that you use to access the data in the network / system of objects. The user interfaces will be relatively simple - much like that of a TV.. On, off, volume, select channels.
To perform more complex tasks, you might use some kind of agent system, assigning tasks to autonomous agents that carry out the tasks on their own and report back to you. Artificial intelligence is an area that has been largely forgotten lately. People make fun (perhaps rightly so) of the Microsoft Office actors (the paperclip), but the fact is that this is a very clever system and can help making systems much easier to use in the future.
Whatever happens, it seems pretty bizarre to claim that computers are getting too EASY to use. Please! We are nowhere near that point yet! The user interfaces we have now are very primitive and un-user-friendly.
The reason, most of the time, is that they are professionals. It's their job.
I don't feel that my mother should know how to program C, but I find unacceptable that somebody who works with computers 8 hours a day doesn't understand the file system.
Imagine a professional driver who only can handle the basic funcionality of a car, or a professional cook that only can prepare canned goods. Both should know more than that, and not stop at the very surface.
The same stands for computers. A computer user, obsessed with ease (because computers are so hard to use) can end up limited by laziness: "I already know how to do <simple thing>, why should I learn anything else? It's too hard. This is for nerds."
I think THAT is the whole problem of making things too easy and hiding what's underneath. Not the fact that more people will have access, but the fact that people will tire themselves and won't go deeper.
Going from Point A to Point B on a road map is rather difficult if the road map only shows the sections of the roads that you will be travelling on. Yes, the map is simple, but it doesn't tell you enough.
One of my peeves is that one can't do as much as they think they can with the easy interface. One good example of this is most of the scanner software out there. I often see scanning software that has simple selections: Scan for web, scan at photo quality, scan for blah...and so on. This isn't always the best. A great majority of the users out there use scanning software for a very specific task -- and most of those people know enough (or far more) to do optimal image settings. Say I want to do a 1280x1024 scan of an image at 32bit and so on -- which option do I choose? scan for web, scan for whatever?
Oversimplification is fine for the average user. But it would be nice if (in many cases) the power user could tweak things so that we can do what we want. Sawfish (formerly SawMill), a windows manager for XFree86 does a good job with this by allowing you to select configuration levels. Why can't everyone do this?
Dude, i agree with most of what you said. (i'd still need to see a windoze box with a year of uptime to believe it.) the windows GUI is probably the best around, but here's an idea: what is you could REMOVE the gui if you didn't want it? perhaps the gui is buggy, and disabling it on a box would increase stability. suppose other GUIs were available, each with their features. here's the kicker: *nix is more stable and harder to use because adding ease-of-use features "clogs up" the system. remember, DOS is stable because it can't do anything.
Mozilla sent them, but Slashdot ignored them. If you want to control the formatting of your text on Slashdot, you need to learn to use the allowed HTML tags.
According to your thesis, this is your fault for not learning the nitty-gritty of the Slashdot interface.
My tachometer is needed because my car has a stick (but am I really more efficient than a computer-controlled automatic?),
I completely agree with everything you said. However, just to make an off-topic point... Yes, you *are* more efficient than a computer-controlled automatic transmission. Well, maybe you aren't, but your transmission is. Automatic trasmissions are still based on a torque-converter, which robs power when it is not in lock-up mode. The manual transmission is mechanically much more efficient.
The only "automatic" transmissions that are computer controlled and more efficient are those based on manual transmission - ala Ferrari and BMW's manumatic transmissions.
On your point of human versus computer efficiency, where transmission are concerned, would be better made comparing a "regular" automatic versus a "tiptronic" or selectable automatic. For the most part, the computer does a much better job efficiency wise, and darn close performance wise.
Stuart
*I dislike selectable automatics*
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
The point of this, surely, is not whether or not the GUI is easy - rather whether you are sacrificing something else to make it so, ie
- Power
- Intuitive extrapolation and cohesiveness through metaphor
MetaphorSo, you know when you double click on a folder and it opens a window, and then you double click on a file, and it opens the file...?
NO, it doesn't. We use these words, we image the metaphor, be it is not presented as such.
When you double click on a folder, it doesn't open at all. On a Mac, or in pc multi window, another window opens representing it's contents, but there is no ongoing link with the folder icon. In a tree representation, things are worse, because you both tree and contents, and the same item can be shown multiple times, in the tree and in the pane, or in the pane and in a document window. Let's try again...
Double click on a home folder or disk icon. It expands to fill a good part of the screen, so that you can see the plain cardboard surface of the folder. The location in which it was sitting shows only the dust outline where it was. It contains a file. You double click on the file, it also expands to fill a large window. There are no cluttering bars around the document, simply a shadow against the background to delineate it, and a transparent attached dragbar. The dragbar also contains the original file icon in the top left corner: This window IS the object. The dusty outline of the file remains in the folder, but is not an icon in it's own right, simply a reminder of where the file will return when you out it away.
The document is open for editing. There is no "save" command, only close. Like the real world, changes are persistent by default. But you can make backups, and you have an undo facility. The icon (top left on dragbar), if clicked, puts the file away - this is the same operation as minimising in effect, because there is no concept of saving the file.
You want to diverge from the form letter you are editing to make changes for a particular occasion. okay...
- Drag the document's icon in the top left of the dragbar to the photocopier tray on screen and let go.
- Now you have two identical documents, the original and the new one
- (Of course, you could have done the same with the closed icon...)
- The new document is open on the desktop, just like the old one. It has no name or location yet.
- Make your changes to each document - remember, all changes go direct to disk.
- Close or 'put away' your documents. The new document has no name or default location, but the UI drops it on the desktop for you with a name reflecting it's creation. You should probably put it away someplace, but the UI should never interfere in simply minimising and maximising documents.
- There are no save or open dialogs. Ever. Just drag documents to the correct place. Or find and double click to open
- You want to open in a different application? Just drop the document on the app or tool (which is also an object).
- You want spell check your document while open? Drag it's dragbar icon to the dictionary object. (You and it both know that the app needs to make write any cached changes - the user doesn't).
ObjectsI've just described object orientedness on the desktop. Objects are unique without necessarily having (displayed) filenames. Objects have one storage location, and a copy in memory would be just that - a copy - if allowed to diverge from the disk copy.
UtopiaWhat does this sound like to you? SOme final thoughts...
Greg.
I have to vigorously disagree with you on that point. A toddlers' mind isnt capable of understanding concepts that arent rooted in concrete images. So while a toddler might be capable of understanding what "home" : the object is, it may only be marginally capable of understanding "home" : the concept. Understanding "love" is probably beyond the capacity of a three year old - other than it realizing that this "love" thing has something to do with hugs and kisses.
Indeed, pictures are how we introduce children to the "virtual" world of concepts. First you show them images that they are familiar with. Then you progress to concepts related to images. And when their mind has matured much more - only then do they become capable of handling concepts which can only be expressed well via words.
PS. I've looked up some of your previous postings and you seem to have a dislike to using email (judging from some of your remarks). I would love to continue this converation off this site - so if you are interested, send me mail at the address, above.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
[Last year we received a technology grant and "up"graded everything to brand-new HP Vectras running NT4; before that the workstations were W95 and the staff machines were Macs].
Well, it's mostly the fact that Mac users are already pretty close to doing it the MS way (for obvious historical reasons). It's the little GUI differences. People who don't have any computer experience won't even get the connection between the mouse and the on-screen pointer, whereas Mac users are GUI experts, they just don't know the MS analogues for Mac objects.
For example, Mac users:
-are slightly more confused by a spare desktop; a good many of them are used to working from Launchers or other pull-out tray-like objects (where MS got the idea for the Office Toolbar). windows users either do everything from the Start Button or have 30 shortcuts on their desktop.
-don't know to use the Windows Taskbar (or Alt-Tab) to switch between maximized windows -- though for the same reason they are better at switching between two active documents in the same app. by using the pull-down menu.
-when i say "now click here" their hands don't assume a left-click vs right-click position. they need to be informed that windows boxen have two buttons (and with the wheels, we have three).
-they try to drag the drive A: shortcut to the Recycle Bin. [grin]
-they ask, "where's the video-editing software?" [double grin]
really, it's a whole-picture -- there isn't any one thing that makes it glaringly obvious (other than the left/right mouse issue), but after helping a sufficiently large amount of people they begin to differentiate themselves in your mind in much the same gestalt-intuitive way that Sherlock Holmes deduced occupation, dietary habits, and musical talents from the rest-position of the subject's hands or small discolorations on a coat.
It's very important for me to be this observant because everyone is at a different level skillwise, and most of my job centers around the accuracy of this estimate.
We won't be able to do intensive database queries if the patron doesn't know the difference between "any of these words" and "all these words"; or, if someone tells me they want to find data on the web, it is essential that I determine whether or not they recognize a link as an actionable object before I say, "let's go to hotbot".
If I misjudge them, I will seem either unhelpful or condescending, both of which are service failures. Being able to quickly assess their experience and respond with targeted assistance saves a lot of time and headache as the research process continues, both from their perspective of obtaining information (often under deadline) and from my perspective of providing quality, professional service.
---
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Excuse me, but I wasn't being anti-intellectual at all. I'm an intellectual myself; geeks are pretty much by definition. What I am against is over-pretentious writing, something which seems to afflict us more and more as time goes by, and is one of the things that gives us a bad name. There is simply no need to make one's writing unnecessarily wordy, with no real purpose to it. Many do it to make themselves sound smarter, but it often has the opposite effect.
----------
I think you are missing the point. These students are there to learn about computing, and this is not their first class. Yet, they find themselves unable to use ftp to transfer files because they have not understood the concept of a "file".
As someone who also teaches (Im an assistant professor), I have had the same experience. The same GUIs that are meant to make work easier, actually make it much harder for students to learn what is actually happening.
You see, each GUI in the world actually presents a fiction to the user, e.g., files are "documents" that are stored in "folders" which can be "moved" to the "trash". This is usually OK if the fiction matches some world the user is familiar with, such as the real world. Unfortunately, that is not often the case. The main problems are:
1- The fiction has to be learned. e.g., right-clicking on a file to get a pop-up menu so I can then send it to the printer is NOT something I was born knowing.
2- Each GUI presents a slightly different fiction to the user, so I have to learn the MAC, Gnome, Windows, and KDE fictions.
3- Often, the fiction changes with each new version of the product, e.g. the meaning of drag-and-drop is drag X to Y and Z will happen, the set of X,Y,and Z are constantly under flux.
On the other hand, there is only one truth. If the students took the time to the learn the one truth (i.e. the way things REALLY work) then they could do as I, and most of us here, do and simply map the system's chosen fiction to the truth. This enables us to quickly learn to use whatever GUI we are presented with.
In the long run, learning the truth is much easier than learning the fictions. That is what I try to teach my students.
What does microsoft have to do with any of this? Easy to use programs exist for Linux, MacOS, BeOS, etc... Nice to know you've determined that the ony right way is your way.
I have a ten page paper to type up later tonight, should I abandon the evil Microsoft ways and do it in vi instead of Word? Would this be acceptable for you cli d00d?
The security hole in Outlook is that it automatically downloads attachments and runs them.
No it doesn't.
The security hole in Outlook is that it let's users launch (or save) an attachment and only shows one (1) dialog warning them that it might be a virus. Maybe it should show 5 dialogs, each with a bigger font. 10? With the patch it now only lets you save it. But you can still launch it through Explorer. Damn.
I would agree that the Mac has a certain intuitiveness about it, but this only last as long as you're doing something familiar. Any time to start getting into specialized applications that are designed to accomplish some very amazing stuff, the issue sometimes isn't realated to the interface, but to the fact that you actually have to learn about what you're doing in order to use it. Boot up a 3D modeling program, and how many people are going to know what vertices, surface normals, or uv coordinates are? You can shield the user from all of this, but then we're right back to where we started...do we make it easy, or do we make it capable?
I don't see most users playing around with VB.
The way I see it, there are two reasons for this:
1) Price. Looking Here, Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Windows® Learning Edition is $109.00. Thier cheapest, lowest-power version of this programming language is over A HUNDRED DOLLARS. That's out of reach for a lot of home users.
2) Functionality. I have Visual Studio Professional installed on my computer. I find Visual Basic is too annoyingly object based for my needs. For example, I want to write a program to send a signal to the COM port and then listen for a reply. In this program, I need a pause for the device on the com port to reply. Only, say, 50ms. It would have been dead easy to implement if I could just enter 'Wait 50' in my program. But no. I have to cann an ActiveX 'Timer' control, set it for 50ms (Timer1.Time = 50), make a call to start it (Timer1.Running = True) and then go to a totally different subroutime to tell it what to do when the timer had timed for 50ms. I could accept the difficulty in a low-level language like C, but it's not like VB is producing high-quality executables. They're messy, oversized and have to be distributed with a sh*tload of big-assed DLLs full of functions I don't want. I say 'screw this'. I'd rather learn C++.
3) Intelligence. Don't overestimate the inteligence of the general population. If you think everyone could learn to program, next time there is professional wrestling on TV, take a look at the crowd shots and ask yourself: Could these people program a computer? The answer is most likely no. Half the population has an IQ of less that 100.
4) Efficency. I want to word-process a letter. At most I want a page of size 10 text printed on one sheet of paper, maybe with some 3D-rendered text at the side. I do not know how to program assembly language to do this for me, but I do know how to do it in Word 97 (I am blindly refusing to upgrade to Office 2000). Sure, I'm not utilizing the whole power of the computer, but that's why I'm running Distributed.net - My tasks don't need to utilise the entire power of a 600Mhz processor and 84Gb of HDD storage. I'd be worried if they did, to be honest.
Anyway, here's my point: Different tools are good for different tasks. A range of modifiers such as speed, ease of use and price efect many software buying and using decisions. People need varying levels of complexity from thier computers, and programs should be able to adapt to that. Word 2000, for instance, should have a switch in the options to turn off the shortening menus. In a good program, as users' ability increases, it should be possible to raise the complexity of programs to suit, with scripting and customisation. If the user want's simple, that should be availiable too.
Just my $0.02
Michael Tandy
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
The majority of web sites don't require HTML smarts to submit. By default /. does. While it allows a few cool features, it is inconsistent and prone to bend over newbie submitters. Slashdot *could* of been standerd, but that's not cool for hacker-macho no?
It's a perfect example actually.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I guess the moderators havent tumbled onto the fact that the guy posting above is the author of the article we are all commenting on.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
What you argue against isn't what he's arguing for (I also think you're wrong, but that doesn't matter).
An example: Right now, off in the bottom right-hand corner of my "desktop," there's an icon for a
What he's saying is that concealing the artificiality of the systemÑthe fact that it's a computer, not a deskÑin such a way may be a mistake. In my example, if I act based on the "desktop" lie , I may act against my own interests. Or, at the very least, I won't really know what I'm doing. He thinks people should know what they're doing.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
>In computing, the contemporary GUI sets aside >the idea of mastery as not only unnecessary but >unattainable.
This is exactly what I believe. The sign of a good GUI is not that a user never exposed to it can immediately master the fundamental basics, rather that mastery of the fundamental basics can be easily applied to the mastery of new programs.
>But the specifics of the spatial metaphor vary >widely. Consider the icons on the Windows >desktop: the Network Neighborhood, My Computer, >Recycle Bin, and any shortcut and file icons >that may be present all have the same basic >appearance -- but they function very >differently. In some applications, dialog boxes >that accomplish file management functions use a >left-to-right hierarchy; others may choose top->to-bottom; still others will make use of both.
The problem with windows is that it makes a lot of exceptions to the desktop metaphor. Move a folder to somewhere else, that's all well and good. Try moving the "control panels" or "dial-up-networking" folder, you're told you can't do it.
Drag a a file to the desktop--no problem. Drag an program to the destop, windows makes a shortcut instead.
>Worse yet, when there is a system problem, and >the structures which supply ease are replaced >with "Unexpected exception in module >Vx00f323.dll" or "Oops. Dumping core . .
Again, another great M$ inconsistency. Objects like "My Computer" are given Plain English names that make sense, but then we take a look at the system files and they're all DOS 8.3 naming convention gobbledygook. Windows is a 32 bit OS, unfortunately windows programmers are still 16-bit. It is intersting to note that the MacOS has a filename limit of 31 characters, but still has system files with far more intuitive names. The example the author gave also illustrates another M$ inconsistency: half the time they try to do everything for the user with their wizards and talking paperclips--and wind up getting in the user's way. The other half of the time they default to their old DOS heritage--and shamelessly and completely abandon the user to a system so arcane, confusing, and erratic that it makes kernel hacking look intuitive.
People say that the desktop metaphor has failed. I say that it is not the desktop metaphor that has failed, but rather the failure of non-mac programmers to adequately understand this metaphor and implement it consistently. Good GUI programmers don't try to do everything for the user, they allow the user to make better, more informed choices in a highly productive manner.
Actually I'd say it is my fault for testing out the latest mozilla milestone here on slashdot.
Never before have have I had any problems with the formatting of any of my posts regardless of the platform or browswer I used to submit them.
Had I been aware that mozilla would have this problem, I most certainly would have used "br" and "p" where needed, in brackets instead of quotes naturally.
As you can clearly see, with regular old netscape, the paragraph formatting is easily achieved with simple carriage returns.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The first problem I see with this statement (actually the implications of it) is that this has little to do with his ideaology of ease. It has more to do with the ideology of familiarity.
If I take a trip over to Europe, and I plug a toaster in, I would feel unsettled by the fact that the outlets look different. This would give me pause because I am not used to outlets looking like that, I would also doubt my abilities to do something simple as plugging in a toaster, because I had never used that type of outlet. But if I want some toast, I can't be afraid to plug in the toaster. Of course, I could always ask someone else to plug it in...hopefully I'd pay attention to how they did it, so i wouldn't have to rely on someone else just to plug in my toaster so I could make some toast.
"Students who manage to download and install the FTP software, and then try to upload graphics and other files they created on their home computers, often don't know where to look for the files they've created on their computer. Because many applications have their own peculiar file-management dialog boxes, students learn how to manipulate files while using each program, but fail to generalize their skills and develop the ability to manage files on a system level."
This whole paragraph has nothing to do with computing, or it's ease of use. It's entirely related to cognition and recognition. Most people have poor cognitive skills. The only problem I see here in relation to computers is that when a computer performs an important action, or when a user performs an important reaction in response to a computer, the interface rarely bothers to mention to the user that this is important. Usually only destructive actions are deemed important, and comstructive actions (which are actually more important) are seen as insignificant by the user interface. We just need an interface that makes people aware of important events. But again, that's entirely related to cognitive skills. Not everyone needs to be told when they are doing something important.
I think the largest advances we will make in computing will be related to an interface that makes liberal use of "Tell me more" and "Don't show me this again" featues, which allow every user to customise the "ease" of their computer. The best example I have ever seen of this is AppleGuide on Mac OS. It would walk you through things and actually circle things onscreen if you needed help figuring out how to do it, but it was only there if you asked for it.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
This is a good analogy -- but I can put a different spin on it. All of the above items should certainly be visible to the driver -- because ALL drivers are concerned with these displays and options. (With the exception of the temperature gage -- which nowadays is often no longer a gage but is simply a warning light when temperature is not ideal.)
There are loads more driver adjustable features on a car though: fuel mixture, engine timing, suspension travel and stiffness, steering sensitivity, idle RPM, turbo boost pressure, etc., etc. Should all of these have dashboard controls? They could. Many race cars to have dashboard controls for some of these.
But in a modern passenger car they're hidden from the driver, because not ALL drivers need them, and their presence will only clutter the interface and confuse the novice driver.
I would much perfer a stable computer than one that could do everything and crash at it. If Microsoft were to release Windows 3.11 and make it uncrashable, I would use it.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
You're preaching to the choir buddy.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Used to be people had to wash their clothes by hand. Now we have these things called washers and dryers. Do you know how a washer works... the mechanics and electronics? How about the dryer and it's heating elements and termerature control system? Do you have to know all that to use the damn things? NO! But that doesn't mean that there are no longer people out there that know the inner workings of washers and dryers, and if one malfunctions it can't be repaired.
I'd like to quote from Voltaire now: "Common sense is not that common." Remind you of a particular article? Maybe... THIS ONE! And what the hell does Marx have to do with this? Christ on a krutch! I swear...
Microsoft Windows meets all of these and more.
No, it doesnt meet number 1. There are no regexps. Functionality is impaired for ease of use. Consider the difference between filtering options available on eudora or outlook to procmail. Writing a procmail script is certainly more difficult than setting filters in a graphical email program, but there is more flexibility in procmail. In fact, since you can call out to shell, I believe procmail is turing complete.
I think it obviously stands to reason that an advanced shell with looping, ifs, pipes, and redirection is far more flexible than a set of widgets and wizards. However, this doesnt mean windows is a bad OS, it is quite a good OS, and what it does is transform a computer into a piece of consumer electronics, so that people unwilling to spend years learning fundamentals of permissions, filesystems, bash scripting, perl, compilation, and tcp/ip can still use the internet and perform simple tasks on computers. Windows 2000 is good because it extends this to the server, allowing non-specialists to even set up email and web servers in a reasonably stable and secure fashion. It is a great thing for very small businesses and home offices, where a sysadmin would cost too much, and nobody around knows how to manipulate a good CLI (such as bash or tcsh) or the emacs environment.
So, from an end-user perspective (that is, absent from programmer-level worries about bloated code and the like), what exactly do people dislike about That Paper Clip?
Personally, my major problem with it is the same problem I have with animated .gifs on the web... I can see it moving with my peripheral vision and it distracts me from what I'm reading or writing. I find it intensely annoying for this reason.
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
Ya know, embarrassing as it might be to admit, I really like That Paper Clip. Most of the time, he hides in a corner, pretty much unobtrusively. On the occasions that he does intervene with comments and suggestions, he's usually guessed what I'm trying to do or spotted a problem that I'm about to get into, and what he says is helpful. And the goofiness of his gyrations when printing, etc, give me a good chuckle, even after a few years.
So, from an end-user perspective (that is, absent from programmer-level worries about bloated code and the like), what exactly do people dislike about That Paper Clip?
Computers are getting easier, but, they aren't losing features. For example, Windows 3.1 is obviously an upgrade from DOS, in that it has a visual interface and it needed DOS to run, so people could use DOS if they want to. Windows 95/98 aren't much different from 3.1, they just have better compression and a few other petty features. If you want a hard, but good operating system, be like me and download Linux from www.redhat.com
Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back!
This was kind of a nice summary. But the rest of it - ugh. A rambling discourse on radical feminism and Marxist deconstructionism. The iMac as an exploitation of females? Did I read that right? I have a transparent phone; I just thot it was cool. I didn't know it represented the "easy woman". My honey & I have long admired those clear plastic washing machines in department stores (she's a geek). But they don't sell them like that .
Most people writing papers don't want to know a lot about computers, and they shouldn't have to. But they must understand how to download and find files, and the Micros~1 GUI doesn't help them. The file manager ("Explorer", the very name of which suggests chaos to be poked about in, rather than order to be displayed) can be set up to display files as a directory tree, but that's not the default.
And if I may rephrase the above quote: "Habitually lazy people are reluctant to admit that some things require work." (His English professor "pointed out" that his consideration of ease-of-use had an ideological basis. Sheesh. English majors.)
We are the first generation of Morlocks. Eat the rich!
Language is hardly a compelling example. Especially English. If anything, it can be used as an argument that we should be able to design something BETTER!
:-)
Just take a look at the words "go" and "do". Someone learning the language would naturally think that they should sound the same, but they don't. That is just one of many possible examples.
We should NOT be creating interfaces that take 20 years to master. Those already exist and they are beyond excuse. We should be creating ways to enable to people to use computers faster and more easily. For some tasks, the CLI works best for others the GUI and for others a combination or maybe something completely different. Most important is to build tools that do the job well and not become locked into this narrow argument of having only one way to do something.
One more note. Considering how much trouble misunderstandings have caused throughout histroy, language could really use some idiot proofing... IMHO.
- Joseph Edward Miele
Did cars ever have this capability?
According to the article, computers have been simplified drastically from what they were; to the extent that users are no longer functional capable of using them. There's such a thing as over simplification, and this author thinks that it's gone that far.
I would agree that this is a good example "hiding the machine from the user", but this is just a natural progresion of computer science.
This is indeed true...but
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis?
is not a natural progression of automobile engineering.
While dump, core and RAM were there in the beginning of computer science, compression per cylinder, mixture (to an extent) and exhaust spectranalysis are relatively new. When engines were first being constructed, the makers had an idea that those were issues, but had no way of measuring those elements nor a really good way of manipulating them. When newer cars came along, tools to maniuplate and measure them appeared. But on the whole, useful cars were constructed without anyone knowing exhaust spectranalysis.
I can't think of a computer science equivalent, which would have to be something that always was at play, but only recently was understood.
This is a clear case on why many of the people shouldn't be using a computer.
Exactly the opposite, this is why interfaces should be easier. Computers weren't meant to get in the way of people doing their jobs, they were meant to help people do them faster. Why shouldn't interfaces be intuitive? Shouldn't this be what we strive for?
I was awakened this morning by a call from my aunt who was having problems with her modem. Her modem couldn't get a dialtone on the phone line but any phone could. It was, of course, an E-Machine with Windows98. So I played with all the control panel options for almost an hour uninstalling and reinstalling the modem. After about an hour she came in and told me it stopped working after a lightning storm. Being in central florida this happens quite often. She made me cuss and swear at the Windows box for over an hour until she told me the lightning bit. Great. All she needs is a new modem. I told her it would be about $20 for a PCI one at any local store. The thought of touching hardware was terrifying to her. Panic had set in. She even offered to pay me to run up and get one for her but I refused so she could learn a little bit. She thought she'd have to ask for an E-Machines modem plus tell them ALL the specs on her PC. It took quite a while to dispell that thought. I recieved two calls from Circuit City with her asking me if it was CIP or PSI. When she got back I was called again and now I was being begged to install the card in the PCI slot. Computers aren't easy to use for the average schmuck still and won't be for a very long time.
Your point about the misleading metaphors is well-taken. However, which part of my comment do you think is wrong? It seems to me that you are talking about something other than the fact that the original author and I were talking about two slightly different points - but that fact doesnt make what I said wrong.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Don't blame me if mozilla didn't send the line an paragraph breaks I inserted into the text through. It came out as a run-on paragraph, it was not typed as such.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
To grossly misapply your car analogy, there is an old anecdote about a car designed by Ken Thompson. There were no instruments on the dashboard at all, except for a single question mark. If the driver made a mistake, the ? would light up. "The experienced driver," said Ken, "will usually know what's wrong."
--
This is not my sandwich.
Is that supposed to hurt my feelings? Seriously, do you really think that your calling me names is going to bother me? I feel sorry for someone who feels they have to lash out at others and try to hurt them. Did something traumatic happen to you that made you this way? Attacking other people isn't going to make the pain that you feel go away. Passing the abuse on to other people makes you no better than the one who abused you. Counselling can help you ok?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
1) Price. Looking Here, Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Windows® Learning Edition is $109.00. Thier cheapest, lowest-power version of this programming language is over A HUNDRED DOLLARS. That's out of reach for a lot of home users.
:-) Think about the software that comes with a Mindstorms set --- it's supposed to let a child create functional robot control programs by stringing together pretty pictures. Programming via point-and-drool won't be very powerful, but I believe that was the original poster's whole idea --- you start with something that doesn't give you quite enough power, which urges you to learn epsilon more, and you keep going in that model.
True. OTOH, software pricing is pretty much artificial. For example, if MS wanted to, they could offer the same sorts of OEM pricing they do for Office. The last time I shopped for a computer, Office was a standard no-cost option from most OEMs. (I also actually happen to get Visual Studio Professional for free, because Pitt has brokered a deal for the souls of the student body. Wouldn't be surprised to see that other universities (where the users of tomorrow are getting their expectations) have similar deals.)
3) Intelligence. Don't overestimate the inteligence of the general population. If you think everyone could learn to program, next time there is professional wrestling on TV, take a look at the crowd shots and ask yourself: Could these people program a computer? The answer is most likely no. Half the population has an IQ of less that 100.
I question the implied assumption that one requires an IQ of 100 or more to program a computer, given the quality of software floating around these days.
I agree with your statement about varying levels of complexity. To some degree, I think we have this, but the problem is that there are deliberate barriers placed in the way of the user's transition to the more complex interface. It takes significant work to go from a default Win98 installation to something that doesn't keep trying to hide my files and options.
The point of interface design is not, as you imply, to make them easy to use for people who have never seen one before, but to make them easy to use for people who have learned how to use them.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
No, you're just another arrogant technophile who's convinced that the world should share his interests.
I hope that you are being sarcastic. Do you really expect companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and Electronic Arts to simply ditch their profitable businesses to get rid of "Lusers"?
However, the above is true only if you're at an equilibrium point, when all factors are in balance and you're forced to trade off one for another. The fact of the matter is, most software is difficult to use simply because it is poorly designed, with skill or little thought given to the end user experience -- end of story.
He he. We are never at the end of *any* story.
Who is saying that we are not at the equilibrium point, given a company's resources and goals in designing a particular software product? When I look at some of Microsoft's more severe UI gaffs, I see other priorities that were put in place over UI. When Microsoft does go out of it's way to study UI, it's all-inclusive bureaucratic structure prevents it from making good UI decisions (I have a friend who works for a human factors firm who often works with MS.) Since that is the case, the ultimate equilibrium is not reachable, since MS is tripping over itself, and taking the software project to some other lower equilibrium. While a theoretical equilibrium does exist and is higher, it is not obtainable. That doesn't mean that the point at which MS, or any other software company, is operating is not an equilibrium where factors are balanced. Indeed, for any software project, the company is rewarded for finding the best equilibrium given its resources.
You see, each GUI in the world actually presents a fiction to the user, e.g., files are "documents" that are stored in "folders" which can be "moved" to the "trash".
That's a very striking point. As Dilger points out, that original interface made sense because the target audience for such a GUI was business workers already familiar with real files, real folders, and real trash cans.
Expecting college students (who probably don't have much work experience in a paperful office) to have an existing knowledge of such things is a problem: The fiction has to be learned.
It doesn't make sense to base the interface metaphor on experience and knowledge the users don't have! You wouldn't expect a city kid to know how to milk a cow, or a bushman to drive a city bus, without some training.
The problem is, users end up learning this metaphor as if it were the truth of things, and not just a convenient mental model to explain the bare metal underneath.
I say, if you're going to have to teach something from scratch, find a better metaphor based on something the users already know, or stick to teaching the actuality of things. Don't maintain the cargo cult repetition of ritual without understanding.
(Yes, this issue is near and dear to me. I've mentioned A GUI for Gurus before, and i'll keep mentioning it until someone builds it. Maybe the Entity folks...)
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how to invest, a novice's guide
Amen, brother! I'm tech support at a large, Midwestern University, and I see the exact same things. You forgot to mention people who leave their email running -- I've lost count of how many times I've shut down email or Hotmail and emailed the person a warning about leaving their email running. I ask them to consider the fact that someone else, less ethical than I, could use their email account (pine from a shell on a Sun box) to do a number of illicit things, not to mention devnulling all their files. The ones that bother to write back and thank me are just *shocked* to discover this!
On the other side, there are the students who know just enough to do damage. My favorite was the person who thought he'd format a disk under Windows NT. Since all the public computers were in use, and it was late at night, he'd thought he'd just "borrow" one of the staff computers (that happened to be accessible by going behind the counter) -- couldn't hurt, right?
At that point in time, staff computers didn't have supervisor passwords on them (they do now ;-), so he just booted up, ran command.com and was at the C: Prompt. He put in his floppy, typed "format a" and sat back, secure in the knowledge that he was going to end up with a formatted disc. Yup -- a formatted HARD disk -- idiot. He'd forgotten the colon after the "a", and DOS was "smart" enough to 1) reject the "a" without a colon and 2) STUPID enough to run format ANYWAY -- on the *C* drive! Aarghhh!!!
Needless to say, there was a great deal of staff wonderment the next morning at that particular computer -- what could have possibly happened? Gee, computers are *so* complicated, etc. :-P The only good thing that came out of all this is that I decided to quit this sorry-ass job cleaning up after L-users and do something more interesting with my life and skills. Final freedom occurs in 431 hours!!! =8-D
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
There is no need to watch water temperature and oil pressure even in a high performace car these days. Production car engines can produce frightening levels of performance without being anywhere near their operating limits, and automatic systems like rev-limiters prevent drivers from inadvertantly harming their engines. This is a good thing! It does not make us dumbed down. It saves aggravation and money. I do not need to take my valve covers off and adjust valve lash to feel I am manly man driving a manly car (or hire some cranky expert to insult and overcharge me for the same precious service). My tachometer is needed because my car has a stick (but am I really more efficient than a computer-controlled automatic?), the boost gauge, however, is pure prurient entertainment.
Now there are some areas where I want clean, realible, transparent, and detailed instrumentation: I want to know every bit of code running on my system and what it is doing, and if any bit of it is snoopware, I want my system to hunt it down like the vermin such code is, and tell me all about it. But the paging, disk cache, etc.? Fugeddaboudit.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Here at a state university, I frequently watch people as they use computers to whatever serves their purposes. And what do I see?
LEGIONS, dozens, nay, *hundreds* of students, who use these computers only to do what they absolutely have to, who use the computers strictly to surf porn, chat, and do email.
It sickens me to watch as these students never learn to do more, and they use the non-SSL webCGI to do their email, because it's pretty and "easy to use."
These people are the ones that just close the browser instead of clicking the "logout" button, leave ICQ registered to them and save their password, leave 1-click shopping turned on at Amazon (in a public lab) and often walk away and forget to logout of the terminal, because "I don't have to do that on the one in my room!"
Sure, "easy to use" interfaces cause the mainstream public to flock to computers, but these people never do learn to do more with a computer than these simple operations.
I've watched students go through year after year, advancing from Freshman to Senior status, and not growing in computer proficiency.
Another common theme among this class of students are the ones who use the lab to type up papers, because the professor requires them to be typed. However, looking through the menus for that spell checker option seems to laborsome; I have grown tired of counting how many college level (COLLEGE LEVEL!!!!) students typing up papers with the reading proficiency of a third grade student.
And I'm in Iowa, the state where we're told we have the highest literary rates, the smartest kids, and the best schools!
To steal a term from alt.sysadmin.recovery, these interfaces spawn thousands of Lusers, not users, not students who are truly interested in computers.
Maybe I'm a bit harsh, considering my first computer booted into BASIC and would do little or nothing without learning how to program it, and assembly quickly became second nature to me. But it wouldn't have, if that computer had a hard disk loaded with windows 98!
If you ditch ease of use, you can focus on other goals, such as security, speed, and flexibility. These parts are far more important than catering to the masses who have little interest in learning to use the tool they have.
If we developed knives that would cut things for the chef automatically, would he learn to use the knife manually? Probably not.
If we made hammers that only needed to hang from a wall and would drive in all the nails, would the carpenter learn how to use the hammer? No.
Likewise, making computers easy to use lures not the truly interested people, it only gets the slightly curious-but-don't-really-give-a-damn people onboard.
Computers should, by their nature, be somewhat difficult to use. This will get the lusers out of the industry, and the students who are flocking to become CS students that are motivated solely by money out. In the end, ditching ease of use will save us.
Let's face it, there are some people who simply should not be using a computer, much less programming one!
Yes, people can learn, but take your average Business or Elementary Education major, give them a one-semester course on Visual Basic, and watch them develop some truly nasty stuff.
We had a Business Major get a job in the ITS dept because it happened to be one of the better-paying student jobs, and he developed this horrible VB app that propogated throughout the labs as our method for authenticating users (on win95.)
And what was the result? No encryption, local lists containing thousands of SSNs on publically-accessible network volumes, a program that segfaulted often and lost students' work when they had to reboot, and open network ports that permitted any user to capture any other users' SSNs. Computers which were virtually unusable because the Ctrl, Alt, and windows keys were disabled.
And don't forget, just removing the vbrun*.dll file would completely circumvent the security completely!
Stupidity breeds stupidity. Mobs are generally panicky and stupid in the first place, and going "easy to use" only makes the lives of the CS/ITS people (who can DO something with a computer) more difficult and troblesome.
Ditch ease of use, and get all the lusers off computers around the globe. Technology will increase, and the cumulative IQ of computer users everywhere will skyrocket.
Ok, so not everyone can use linux. Not every one can use a dos prompt. That is why we have GUI. Stop pretending you are so much better than anyone else and that others shouldn't have access to computers and avanced technology.
My 60+ year old uncle happens to have a doctorite in history, and doesn't have time to learn how to use a command prompt. He uses a mac, most of you wouldn't argue that he is smart, but why should he have to learn how to use a command line interface for typing his next book in Appleworks?
Grandma doesn't want to be a luddite, but why should she have to login, type startx or whatever windowing system she is using, then go though a POS patched together interface to use email?
This has bothered me for a long tine how the people on slashdot or so elitist, and think others shouldn't use a computer if they don't know. linux, bsd, solaris, (instert unix like operating system here).
We should help people by making tech easy for everyone to use. What do you want, 5% of the population to know computers, the others to rely on you and your greatness? That would just fulfill a horrible Orwillian fantisy of the smart only having power. Get over it, that others want to use computers to forward their knowledge.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
The GUI can be considered like clothes, or the icing on the cake. In almost all situations (Macs excluded) the GUI is not required to use the system. This philosophy seems to now be going the way of the dodo ( thank you, uncle Bill) but it was once quite true, and it still is, at least for a little while longer.
So with the GUI as the clothes,
the central OS can be considered the skin,
and programming anything with moderate complexity requires knowledge of the anatomy at the skin level or below.
The sad thing is, a great many new users will go into a store, see the computer's flashy clothes, and then by it, as if it were all a fashion contest.
And so, that's how the BigCompaniesTM will set them up--give it the prettiest clothes they can.
But that has little value when it comes to actually using the computer for things more interesting than writing a paper, checking email, or webbrowsing.
It just sickens me to see how the cycle is propogated. Newbies buy easy to use Windows boxes, and their kids become script kiddies and chat junkies, but all too often don't learn about the computers' internals, or how it really works.
They can move and click a mouse, and that's all that really matters...right?
I distinctly recall a kid who tried to tell me he was a 1337 hax0r, and then tried to con me into passing him all my registered software. Less than a week later, he came to me to say that his sister had acquired a computer and he couldn't configure it to dial into our local ISP. When asked why, he said, "My sister dropped the mouse, so it didn't work!"
Since when is the mouse required to configure a computer for Internet access?
I was fortunate, I guess, because some Great White Guru came down and divined into my brain the knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts.
But should that not be common knowledge?
Somehow, it seems that this paper missed its own point. It states the real problem:
/., does, they focus on the mechanics of getting something done and fail to gain the understanding of what it is they are doing.
Students can begin to assume they can't get their work done without the computer helping them.
That has nothing to do with how easy the computer makes doing their work. The real problem is that they do not have a real understanding of what it is they are doing. As the paper, and most of the comments on
In fact, the original problem which motivated the paper is that instructors are asking their students to create hypertext projects to complement traditional essays. So they focus on creating essays, which is the actual work that needs to be done. Then they bring in an alternate way to do the work, using the computer, which is supposed to be a way to illustrate what is the actual work (the organization and expression of ideas) and what is the technology (pen and paper, typewriter, word processor, or powerpoint) that is used, so that they can learn to focus on the work, regardless of the technology. That should be the real point of a writing class.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
You're totally missing the point of the original article. The idea is not that computers should not be made easy to use; it's that ease of use should not be allowed to become (remain?) something that is disempowering for users, something that makes them dependent on something they don't understand.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
Exactly... Expecting to be able to get behind a computer the very first time and be able to use it is like expecting to be able to get behind the wheel of a car for the first time and be able drive across Paris without getting a scratch on your car. Or like putting a rooky behind the controls of a Boeing 777 or an F15 and expect them to be able to take off and fly them.
Computers are complex machines, much more complex than any other machine used by man, and thus learning to use them (properly) will take much more time than learning to use a VCR, for example. A lot of people I know don't know how to use their VCR, so how could they possibly operate a machine that's thousands upon thousands of times as complex?
Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS go a long way to make computers easier to use. Too long a way. Many people expect to be able to buy a computer and work with it right away, without having to learn anything about computers first, not realising that it's not a simple kitchen appliance but an incredibly complex and powerful machine instead. They want to be able to drive a car without knowing how to use the clutch or the stick. They want to be able to drive around a city without knowing anything about traffic rules, like that you have to keep right, have to stop when the light goes green and the exceptions to that, and the exceptions to those exceptions ("no turn on red").
The internet is being flooded by people who send HTML email with lots of flashy colours, who make homepages in Frontpage that either come straight from a template or that have the most eyetearing colours you've ever seen and put them online on Geoshitties, Xoom, Yahoo or whatever. People who think netiquette somehow doesn't apply to them, that they should be able to decide what they do and do not want to do.
Yes, netiquette isn't a law, neither are table manners, yet when you're in a restaurant, you do adhere to table manners, so why don't you adhere to netiquette when you're online? Why do you spend lots of time learning to drive a car, yet expect to be able to use a computer instantly?
*sigh*
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
And 99% of the people here are "hacker-macho" so that's fine. Just like, say, a debbuger doesn't need a fully standardized UI.
Everyone seems to have their own take on what the author's trying to say (unusual for slashdot..) I'm not surprised, he keeps contradicting himself. But most of the time, it's fairly clear that he's not saying we should't make software easy to use. Rather, he's asking questions about the dark side of ease-of-use.
I think this is the whole reason why he keeps talking about ideology. Ideology, as he admits, is a disputed concept in itself. His understanding of ideology is taken from the Birmingham school, but he doesn't really go into what that means. For the benefit of those who don't have a sociological background (and who are interested - as for those people who complain that he uses obfuscating terminology, go see what your non-techy mates think about GUI, Corba and Rambus, before you carry on complaining about specialist terminology), here's a short, fairly inaccurate summary:
Ideology is the battlefield where social groups fight using culture / symbolism as their weapons. The classic example is punk. Here, a dominant culture clashes with an 'underground' culture, and the wider battle is mirrored in smaller struggles over the meaning of, for example, a safety pin (a piece of bourgeois haberdashery, or all-in-one ear piercing tool and earring). Later formulations of this approach have been keen to move away from an over-simplifying dominant / sub-dominant analysis of culture.
How is this relevant to the author's ease-of-use hobby horse? I'm not entirely sure, and that's a problem with this article. But he seems *very* upset about the fact that his students don't understand Unix, so perhaps what he's saying is this: the modern workstation is the battlefield where the macho hacker ethic comes into conflict with the self-perpetuating, dumbing-down tendencies of those that claim to act in the interests of market forces. And the UI is the weapon. The result is that the average user loses out all round. By making ease of use an end in itself, we find ourselves in situations where it is "...possible to use a computer without knowing how to manipulate the files located on it." I think this is very true. Most people don't know how to use computers, they know how to use specific applications. The concept of a file is alien to most users. Instead, they know that when they hit "save" in word, they can hit "load" another time, and get what they were writing back again. Because they can't generalise this knowledge back to a filesystem, they are unproductve when they switch between applications, let alone OSs.
If this is what the author's getting at, I couldn't agree more. What I'm disappointed about is his lack of analysis of the protagonists in this battle over the UI. He hints that the desktop in its current incarnations is "gendered" as feminine. This is an intruiging idea, but he never goes further than hinting at the equivalence in cultural stereotypes: feminine/soft/"easy"/average user/technologically inept versus masculine/hard/picky/el33t/hax0r.
What I want to know is: who does he think is fighting this struggle? What are their economic / social relations? And is the GUI desktop masculine or feminine?
I'm a bit late on this, but that's my 0.02 worth anyway. I remember similar discussions from a number of fields. Mom tells me that cooking was supposed to be knowing how to cut every kind of vegetable. Today we buy it already sliced and frozen. Also for machinery - any kind of it. As close as ten years ago me and some friends used to fix our own car engines. Today is everything electronic, so it's impossible to do it again.
Have we lost something? Yes, of course. We have better cars, and we have good food. It's everything ready for use. However, we used to do it ourselves before. Sometimes we messed up, and sometimes we did it great. Things just changed. Each generation lost something. When I began to use computers, you were supposed to know the innards of the CPU, memory cycles, TTL ports... It's not needed anymore. Someday the entire notion of files will not be needed also.
This has been happening for *ages*. For every generation people say that we are screwing up, because it will be impossible to live without knowing <this> or <that>. I dont think that we actually need to be afraid of this kind of change. I dont need to know how to fix my own car, or verything similar for that matter. However, I think that we *need* to understand the basics. While I can buy deli food, I like to know how to do it myself. The same for everything - computers, cars, and so on. It's out of my curiosity. I simply cant understand people who are lazy enough to ignore or suppress their own curiosity - they're just 'living dead' for me.
But identifying an entire OS by the kernel also seems weird. (I'm not running "Kernel32", I'm running Windows.) So saying that I have GNU/Windows elevates MS a bit, and indicates that the GNU programs on my machine really matter to me. They aren't just Window dressing. (PUNishing, ain't it? ;)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Scripting is something I think all interfaces ought to expound with. I really wish that scripting was made a bit more up front than it is right now. Mac has some pretty good scripting because its 100% plain speech (as long as you know the right commands). Linux needs a plain-speech translator for not only scripting but normal typed commands. Fuck learning archaic and sometimes confusing commands (typing lpr foo.text is not an intuitive way to print anything). I want to type "print all documents in directory foo and then delete them" and have it do just that.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So you think people ought to adapt to a computer-a tool-than the computer-a tool-adapt to them? If you got into college it must be truely easy. Its unfortunate that computers are so difficult to use, they abound with unfamiliarity and unintuitiveness. Why should anyone have to remember a set of commands merely to move a file into another directory? Most people run around using bash or c and expect everyone to just use it because they can't seem to write a better shell. Although it would be pretty easy to write an intuitive shell that let users type fairly plain instructions and have the computer sort out the intricacies. The people you're so fond of criticizing don't lack anything other than the right commands to get done what they want. Most if not all people with a little experience with computers understand the concept of files as objects and directories to catagorize and coallate but not everyone knows bash or c.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It seems like everyone here considers themselves to be experts at computer interfaces, they know all the keyboard shortcuts and can easily whip out all sorts of bash commands if so prompted. They're also fucking assholes who can't begin to fathom that to most people computers are merely tools that get some work done and enable you to do some things. A CD player has a small handful of controls on the front, you put your CD in and it starts to play it and allows you to switch trackes or scan through a song. You don't need to understand how the internals work, you don't even have to be particularly adept at using anything in order to work said CD player. My friend's neice can operate one and she's four. This is a good computer interface, this is what computers need to strive for. Until they are this easy to use they will not be "too easy to use". You're not superior to anyone because you know a heap of bash commands, you might be adept at computer use but you're not any higher on the fucking food chain. The article fails to realize this, in an unfortunately typical way. Computers are beginning to exist in homes with near ubiquity yet are barely easier to use than they were 15 years ago. Thats just sadism.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
this subject has been up before. i'm not sure where the link is on slashdot's archives, but i know it's been up before.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Ease of use and ease of learning are too analogue to be mutually exclusive. You can have something that's pretty easy to use and not too hard to learn, for example. I think "orthogonal" would be about the right word here.
While I agree that the "smart menus" feature of Office is a really bad idea and extremely annoying, I would disagree that users should learn everything about their computers. My parents can't program their VCR, but they don't care, they hit record and go to bed. If a time comes when they need to program the VCR, they'll ring me and get me to teach them. :)
This same theory applies to computing. Why should I care what my computer has to do to startup? As long as it starts up, that's fine. When I wanted to dual boot with Linux, then I learnt what my computer does when it boots. As long as I can do what I need to do, why should I learn stuff I don't need?
The obvious answer here is that I may be doing things the hard way. If I find my way so hard that I want to find an easier way, I can start to head down the learn how things work path. I shouldn't be forced to learn everything before I can start work though.
So, ease-of-use of productivity? Both. GUIs should be easy enough so that any user can immediately achieve results (unrealistic but something to head towards), but then the user should have the opportunity to learn about their computer and become more productive. The two aims are not in opposition with each other.
Adrian Sutton.
Give me a computer with a nipple any day.
mugwump
I ask this because all the comments so far are based on the statements in the /. summary, not the article itself.
His argument is that ease-of-use has ceased to be the means (as it was initially with the desktop metaphor) but the end of GUI design. That is, programmers are now trying to make things easy on the user, instead of easy to use productively.
An example of his point I'd like to reference is the "smart menus" in Microsoft Office, which deliberately hide functions in order that the user doesn't have to see them. That actually makes it harder to use the software's functions, and it doesn't make it any easier to use the existing ones; it simply lets the user feel at-ease, never even seeing options he doessn't understand.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Mixture and exhaust analysis, maybe, but compression indicators have been used by engine experts since the age of steam, before cars existed. They plot a continuous record of cylinder pressure as a function of crankshaft phase on a strip of paper.
2) allowing users to opt-in to the advanced-user features and interface. (think "advanced options" buttons in an interface)
Bingo. The thing about Windows is that it makes it really easy to do easy stuff, but extremely hard or sometimes even almost impossible to do the harder stuff because it's all hidden away to protect the beginners. Sometimes to solve a problem you have to get closer to the internals of a program or an operating system, and Windows often won't allow you to do that, leaving only the option of completely reinstalling the system...
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
The GUI's are easyer until something goes wrong. Then the user has to either figure it out or get help. Besides if every user had a basic understanding of a computer's OS and how to really work it, I'd be out of a job.
For those interested in another article (?) along the same lines, written by someone who has writing, not computers, as his profession, and therefore is quite good at it...
n ning_was_the_command_line/
http://www.cyberpunkproject.org/lib/in_the_begi
The article is long, but very well-written and from the point-of-view of the USER. I recommend to everyone.
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. Dies nox et omnia michi sunt contraria
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. Dies nox et omnia michi sunt contraria
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"(I should note here that I will be writing "students" all along when perhaps I should be saying "users" or something like that. The set of problems I will identify here is common to graduate students, instructors, staff, and undergraduates. However, I dislike the word users, and as a rhetoric and composition specialist my focus is teaching, so I'll be using "students" most of the time.)
Every student who takes a course in the NWE has a UNIX account with almost totally unrestricted Internet access. Students can make Web pages in one of the five NWE classrooms using one of several HTML editors available through our X-Windows interface. However, many students find the transition between the online environment and their home computer very unsettling."
The sample is flawed. Therefor, the conclusion is biased.
Yes, Newbies have trouble learning.
Yes, New network recourses require some learning.
Yes, New a interface requires going through a learning curve.
In short, this is little more than a helpdesk employee whinning about how stoooopid the CEO is for not remembering his subnet IP. Moreover, We've come a long way over the years to make computers easy and, if we would have never move toward "ease of use" we would all be writing our own drum memory drivers to push individual bits!
The "I think you're wrong" part was just a hastily-worded aside. "Wrong" isn't the right word. Probably sounded a little bitchy. What I meant was this: I think pictures are a hindrance to *understanding* computers, however helpful they may be in getting us started *using* them, and I agree with the article's author that understanding them is important (and that "ease" is the ground of an ideological battle).
I don't think that the difference between information conveyed via text vs. pictures is a difference in quantity, but in kind, and, in this case, in unconscious motivation. Abstractions that are "unnatural"Ñlike the workings of computers and the structure of internet, or complex political/ideological concepts, or poetryÑcan't be conveyed in pictures without stripping them of most of their meaning. A picture meant to represent "home" or "love" can work because we all have ideas of "love" and "home" in our heads, or we know what most people mean to convey when they show pictures of those things, because we've seen their pictures a million times already. Since not too many of us have "FTP" or "Frankfurt School Marxism" or "Your mouth is like Columbus Day" worked out so clearly in our heads, pictures can't convey them honestly to us, and relying on others' pictures of them puts us at a knowledge-disadvantage to the picture-makers (who are working from ideology, however unconscious). Computer interface is a metonym of this problem, and what I think you're "wrong" about is the innocent helpfulness of pictures on our screens. Not that words are any "better," generally. In the case of computers, though, I think they are, because they give us *more.*
I should have finished school and become a professor; I'd be really good at faking this po-mo stuff for money [smiley].
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
All of the above certainly employ computing technology. They even all have interfaces though of vastly differing sorts. No, none of them are the same as the general-purpose box that sits on your desk yet many of them duplicate the functions it performs.
At one time a 'computer' was a large hulking device that sat in a special air-conditioned room attended by a cadre of highly trained folks that spent all day performing mathematical calculatiions (hence a "computer".)
Now we use that underlying technology to edit digitized video, play interactive simulated 3D games, and instant-telegraph each other.
Are all of those 'computing'? Well, yes in one sense but no in another. Are all of the devices listed above 'computers'? Well, yes in one sense but no in another. Do all of them have interfaces? Well, yes in one sense but no in another.
What and how we use 'computers' have evolved. Their capabilites have also evolved. To argue that they've become 'dumbed down' is to ignore their ubiquity and specialization.
Tools are built appropriate to a their task. For computers that task is no longer calculating large tables of ballistics or whatnot but rather the ones listed above plus so many others. That we limit our tools to their task is not suprising: it's smart engineering.
Kee It Simple, Stupid means defining a tool's functions and paring off extranious functions. Make it the best at what it does and don't compromise it with superflous features. If it can be multipurpose great but don't let this interfere with it's basic usability.
Computers have become specialized tools. To confuse optimizing their functionality for their task (oftentimes interfering with extranious or lower-priority functions) with 'dumbing-down' is to ignore the features this specialization brings.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Has anyone read through the official Apple Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (available as a PDF from somewhere on http://developer.apple.com/)? This document dates from the relatively early days of the Mac, but it's great stuff - you can read it and see exactly what's wrong with Windows (and other UI's), even though it was written well before Win95 was released.
The Mac isn't "dumbed down". Instead, all the functions needed are accessible, even to a novice user. Extra functionality needed? Go get a shareware or freeware extension for the OS - there's tons of them (OK, there's very little open-source out there).
Windows is what I would call "dumb" - not "dumbed-down". I still remember the first time I used Win98, after having used Win95 a few times before - I tried to traverse the Start menu and wound up dragging menu items around the menu and onto the Desktop! And this from an experienced computer user.
Then I have to use M$ Word for my C.Sci. exam, and I spend at least 10 minutes searching for the "Turn off autocorrect" and "Turn off spelling/grammar checking" options because they frankly get in the way... I had to know exactly what I was looking for in order to find them. That is *not* ease of use. An electric typewriter is easy to use, because you know what it's going to do when you hit the keys.
As for Linux... well there are quite a few GUIs for it, but I've never really tried to use Linux as my primary workstation OS. My elderly 486 sits in the corner with my modem inside it and runs a whole lotta server processes rather nicely, thank you. I've tried KDE and GNOME, and prefer KDE because you can configure it to behave roughly like a Mac (ie. predictably). I use FVWM2 more often than not, though, because it's so lightweight and does everything I need it to.
The command-line looks daunting to a novice, I'll grant you that. But my mother has learned to effectively use a BBC Micro where she has completely failed to master any of three different GUIs (RiscOS, MacOS, Windows). I feel confident I could teach her to use Pine, Pico and possibly Lynx, whereas I would shudder at the thought of letting her loose on Eudora, X-Emacs or Netscape. Different people have different skills - most do well at following step-by-step instructions however, and that earmarks them for the command-line. But "ugh - it doesn't have pretty pictures!"....
--- The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it ---
- It's easy for me to get food. I can pop something frozen into the microwave, or order a meal at a restaurant. I could move beyond this ease if I wanted to and get more control -- buy hundreds of dollars worth of decent kitchen supplies, take cooking classes, scour local markets for an eggplant of the perfect ripeness. But I have no intention to, nor any moral obligation to.
- It's easy for me to drive. I can operate my automatic transmission car safely to get from point A to point B, and I take it into a shop when it acts up. I could move beyond this ease if I wanted to -- learn to drive a stick-shift, buy hundreds of dollars worth of tools, learn to rebuild my own transmission. I have no intention to, nor any moral obligation to.
- It's easy for me to build up my pension fund. The government and my employer take a chunk off my paycheque and they do whatever they do with it. I don't even think about it. I could move beyond this ease if I wanted to -- start a self-directed plan, hire my personal stockbroker, spend the entire day combing the financial pages for information that might allow me to squeeze out a couple more percentage points in my returns. I have no intention to, nor any moral obligation to.
I could keep adding to this list for a long time. There are a few areas -- computing is one of them -- where I have decided to take more direct control over my life, but there are dozens of areas where I have decided not to and I take the easy way. It's unavoidable. I have barely enough time to manage those few areas I do the hard way -- I would need a few dozen more hours in a day if I did all of them the hard way.So most people (including the article-writer's students) feel about computers the same way I feel about cooking, cars, and pension plans. They have chosen to devote their time to doing things the hard way in other fields. The easy way in computing accomplishes everything they really need accomplished.
Yet for some reason, we think they have the moral obligation to do more. Why? Why should computing be any different from food, cars, and pension plans? Why are you a worse person if you use Windows than if you use a microwave or an automatic transmission? (In fact, you'll probably live longer if you devote your time to cooking your own food instead of hacking Linux.) How are you caving in any more to the ideology of ease?
I agree with the article writer that it's a good idea to make students aware of the ideology of ease and to explore some of its consequences. But I worry that all it will accomplish is to make students feel inadequate for having made different choices than their teacher.
I just realized I didn't answer your question, which part of your comment I thought was wrong, directly.
It was the thing about the toddlers. It seemed to imply that we show them pictures to help them understand things. I think that we show them pictures to *limit* their understanding of things (like "home" and "love" above).
Sorry. Having too much fun babblin' like a troll.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
I started using Linux about 2 years ago, before it was the next big thing amongst all computer geek wannabes, when you had console, or MAYBE a basic GUI, and all hardware had to be manually fiddled with to get it to work. Ahh, linux, an OS where getting things to work right was a true accomplishment. Now anyone who wants can install Linux with an easy graphical install (*ahem* Corel).
Then there's HTML, I started doing webpages when the web was still primarily University run, before all the junk showed up. Doing it all in notepad was the only way you could do it. Now any idiot who can use a word processor can make webpages.
Everything is getting so easy that no one bothers to learn the underlying mechanics or components to technology. This of course is great news to those of us who have learned it/understand it. Because we have all these people dependant on the pretty point and click buttons that when something goes wrong (as is always the case with computers) they will come running to us.
Once again the seperation of geek and wannabe is becoming more clearly defined, as things should be.
I think that the quote from the article makes it sound more like a zero-sum game, in which you can't win unless someone else loses by the same amount.
I find it ironic that a paper on ease of use uses such unapproachable language. I found to be over-analytical and bombastic (I love self-describing words).
I think good UI is intuitable, i.e. users can easily use intuition to figure out how to accomplish a task. You should study users habits to come up with such an interface. If you ask a user what should be in an interface, they rarely tell you what you're looking for. Instead you end up with a lot of bells and whistles and a paradigm that doesn't work the way most people would find natural. This a large part of the reason that Windows (and other MS apps) look and act the way they do (aside from the crashing).
Another thing this article doesn't take into account is that most software development teams tend to treat UI as an afterthought or an experimentation in aesteics.
Lastly, if you are going to have users use FTP, I think that it's perfectly reasonable to expect those users to understand what they are doing, i.e. transfering files. It sounded like they didn't have a firm grasp of file management and I can hardly blame the UI for that. RTFM, but good documentation is another story.
-Jennifer
The user should be able to decide the balance between ease of use and functionality. A good piece of software will allow the user to select the balance that they wish to have. Those who want functionality should be able to use what is 'functional' for them. Those who want ease of use should be able to use an interface that is 'easy' for them. It should be a dynamic thing, not static.
1) The best processors and hardware are designed to work best with Windows. All of these components take advantage of specific code inside Windows to bring us the best performance, particularly with processor intense work like multimedia.
Which is why 3D rendering on MIPS R10K chips (which run much slower than PIII's) is still faster than Intel boxes and why Photoshop on the Mac is still king. Oh, silly me. Wait, that's right, Windows is a faster web server, except Linux beats it hands down and Sparcs are phenomonal.
2) The when required phrase is key here. We aren't talking as much about how often completely new vesions come out, we're talking about the regular updates and bug fixes that any software requires.
Really. Explain why the F00F bug took 2 months to get fixed in Win95 and why critical security bugs are fixed faster on the free *nix systems than anything showing up on Microsoft's site.
Windows has the Windows Update web site. It has no peer, in fact, MS has a patent application pending because it is so good.
Oh, like that means anything.
There is no better way to be sure you have the latest security fixes and functionality patches.
Except most anything put out by a competitor.
Windows is extremely stable given its functionality, particularly the 2000 version. Uptimes of more than 1 year are common with properly configured systems.
Really? You have a release-copy Win2K box running for more than a year? I'd like to know how you managed that one. Course, Win9x until recently couldn't stay up *AT ALL* for more than either one or three (I forget which) month(s) because of a timer wraparound. Through NT4SP6 there are fixes for memory leaks and such that have a noticible impact on performance and stability after a couple months. No, you may have "correctly configured" boxes, but those boxes are massively overpowered compared to what you need.
Since we're talking "non-standard" systems, Alan Cox had a Linux box up for 4 years without a reboot, and this was the system that was known to have problems with a timer wraparound after a little over a year.
If you don't know how to set it up, don't bother to knock its stability.
Microsoft has constantly and continually billed NT/W2K as something easy to set-up and administer. Are you now admitting administering W2K/WinNT is not a simple matter?
The UI in Windows is customizable in a limitless number of ways.
This I want to see.
Want your file manager to look like a web browser? Done. How about putting web objects on your desktop? Done. Details in your file view of just big icons? You can have either with Windows.
Ooooo! As if that means anything useful. You give me a very small subset of things I can change. Can I change the window manager easily without worry about its stability and interaction with other programs? No. Does Windows offer me a way to significantly alter the feel of the desktop, not just the look? No. Does Windows offer me a selection of full-featured scriptable command-line shells? No.
You people will label me as a troll, but all of these points are valid.
Really? All those invalidated points don't mean squat to someone looking at facts.
Linux and BSD and the like can't hold Windows' jock strap in these areas.
That would be because Windows doesn't have a jock strap. It's not even playing with the little boys, much less the big boys in these areas.
It also goes a hell of a long way better than this, it can do SMP better,
Only for databases. For everything else it sucks raw eggs at SMP.
is easier to manage,
Didn't you just say that you had to be highly skilled to properly configure an NT server?
faster for most tasks,
You mean slower at common tasks, right? The Mindcraft test was an obvious joke, considering hardly anyone runs 4 NICs in a web server. Instead, they buy lots of little web servers which gives nice redundancy. On a single NIC system, NT gets its ass handed to it on a platter by Linux. Badly. Very badly.
more intuitive,
People like you keep saying this. I do not think that word means what you think it means. Windows is "intuitive" because it's familiar. If I deliver someone who has never *SEEN* a computer a Windows box and a Linux box, I'd wager money that neither will be intuitive to that person. Of course, NextStep makes Windows look like a Rube Goldberg contraption in terms of intuitiveness. Oh, wait, Windows *IS* a Rube Goldberg contraption in terms of intuitiveness.
has the backing of a major corporation,
Which has been proven to be illegally operating a monopoly and is doing its best to keep consumers locked into its platform, an act which is blatantly bad for the consumer.
virtually all software is released in a Windows version.
Finally a point, albeit a very minimal one. If the software you need to run, runs on another system, why constrain yourself? That and I can use Win4Lin or similar to use the software that is unavoidable.
Can any of these things be said of Linux?
Yes, and I wouldn't be lieing when I say them, unlike you and Windows.
--
Ben Kosse
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Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
True, Truespace 2's interface leaves a little to be desired. However, most of my experiance is with Truespace 3 & 4. They really do have great UIs. It's a little quirky, but for a program in which you'll spend a great deal of time, it's learning curve isn't that bad. The UI is very efficient, and (from my point of view) intuitive. Most of the faux pas that the site mentions (like unlabeled command buttons) are gone in Truespace 4, and in general, the right-click context menus negate most of the problems with hard to find icons. In the end, real world results are what matter. I was able to start using Truespace (2.0 I think) and with no previous graphics experience, I made a little rocket animation within in about 15 minutes. The toolbars become transpant to use, and the whole interface has you concentrating more on your product than the program. The site might not like it, but a lot of people who have used the program extensivly seem to like it, and I suggest you spend some time with it before passing judgement on its interface.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And I choose to believe that people are extremely adaptable and able to overcome all kinds of complexity. By this reasoning, how on earth can a challenge become disempowering? The disempowerment stems from the attitudes that individuals form about themselves when they face adversity. It is a path that they choose for themselves...and represents the opportunity for growth. If you are afraid of learning...you will always feel disempowered. Learning means exposing your weaknesses and trying to overcome them. If you view an individual as a finite deterministic machine that cannot grow...then yes, I agree that contemporary computers are disempowering. However, if you believe that folks have an massive ability to adapt and learn...then computer literacy represents enormous opportunity. I will never minimized that feature among human beings.
It is true when you develop an interface and you focus on only User Interface you will be loosing out on power. Eg How can you make sed truely userfriendly withough having tons of controols that fills up the screen and still make it so it can be ran in a script. But with the current Unix Style Interface From GNOME, KDE and CDE there is a user friendly interface on it that most people can use easiely but when it comes to do more then ordanary jobs it is nice to have an XTerm handy to do it. But Still the GUI alone is a sacrifice for the convience of multable windows on one screen because you will loose system recources for the interface. I have notes by working in the Computer Science Lab that every year students are less Computer Savie. While my freshmen year student knew DOS and the Windows platform was no problem they can easy go to their files and manipulate them and they can understand that their files are on a network. But now the majority of the students do not know they have a shared network directory because it isnt easily visiable off of My Computer they have to be told and explained in detail that they have the F: drive. God help them when they start using Unix they are unprepared for the Shell Prompt and dont understand that you type a command then it dose something add a prameter it dose it differently. By being tought the userfriendly way they are not trained to think more flexabily and find computers to static for more powerful usage and fear from meadia who is selling the userfrienly stuff make people afraid of trying something new.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Office workers who first used desktop computing were the same ones who used the old typewriters, the same ones who made the environmental switch from manual to electric (IBM Selectronic, in fact, was the standard).
But the early machines, like the Displaywriter and the Wang, actually made few changes from the selectronic sensibility. It wasn't until Word Star and the other early WP programs came along, name brands for software as opposed to name brands for hardware, that changes in the environment had a critical impact on the user's ability to do their job.
A change from NT to Windows 2000 generally means not just upgrades to the OS, but also loss of backwards-compatibility and the loss of many little settings that the user has grown comfortable with, since the IT types are usually ghosting a new "standard set-up" when doing such a mass install. So all the little short-cuts, formatting changes, preferred email editor, etc. are lost along with the old environment.
In the old days, we used to train the whole staff whenever we got a new copier. That "we" applied to a lot of different places. Now, we just expect the user to adapt to the new environment without a blink. And, we often lock down their ability to make the system tweaks so they get the old shortcuts back. If they know where to find them.
The loss to industry around the world every time Windows goes thru a new generation is staggering, in terms of lost productivity, lost files, need to convert, loss of transparency, etc. And we never count the training costs or lost productivity in the cost of the upgrade.
In the case of the article which started all this, it sounds like no one ever bothers to explain to the students how to use Windows Explorer, which is actually a pretty neat little way to handle a directory structure, and when you learn to use it, you can change your default directories on all of those software packages to put the files wherever you please. (Probably the generic system stuff is considered to be not in the province of any particular course, and so it never gets taught.) TFMs used to say "Check with your system administrator for specifics of your particular operating environment," but that seems to have gone out the window along with training for upgrades.
And furthermore, a file is no longer a file, it is a particular instance of a particular type of file, and so a .doc file is not the same thing as a .xls file. Why should the user be expected to look at them all as generic files if they never used a command line editor?
BUt I'll agree that so called ease of use is often just the opposite for anyone who learned a previous version. Example: anyone who grew up on Lotus graphing lost lots of functionality with a switch to Excel when they lost the visibility of custom settings that Lotus had. In Excel these days, you have to go into VB to make some of the kinds of tweaks that used to be simply made by the Lotus app.
Ocean Barb, been there, done that, and the t-shirt's so old its got holes in it
I sure hope his dissertation committee won't let him keep the "easy women" metaphor when it comes to the dissertation.
How long did it take you to learn to read and write with extreme proficiency? Most people spend over 10 years, and some spend over 20 years just learning to read and write with proficiency.
Why do we spend 20 years of our life to learn to read and write? Is it because reading and writing is hard, or is it because reading and writing is so critical that our society DEMANDS high proficiency.... Proficiency that takes two decades to learn.
Computers are turning the same way. Kids are learning computers the same way they learned reading and writing. Because they're so valuable, so powerful, and so versatile.
Reading and writing is the most powerful tool yet imagined by the human mind. It let's one record knowledge, disseminate it, and store it. Computers are becoming just as powerful a tool.
We should be designing interfaces that may take 20 years to master, but create incredibly proficient users. Just with illiteracy, some people won't have the time or ability to gain that proficiency.
Idiot-proofing isn't the correct answer. We don't idiot-proof reading and writing skills, why should we do the same for computers skills?
Society needs the greatest number of people to be incredibly proficient in using computers.
All too often, I've been called in to solve even the simplest problems with comptuers. A better question would be, are users getting better at learning what computers are capable of doing. It's been my experience that many users stop problem solving when sitting in front of a computer. Take the average user and put them in a situation in real life and many of them will think through the problem. Put that same person in front of a computer in a work setting, and they get dumb-founded.
Certainly, these users have learned how to do tasks as difficult (if not more so), than use a computer. Maybe it stems from a fear of "mucking up the works", or from fear of learning new skills, but there has to be a more psychological reason why people don't (or won't) master this very simple appliance.
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IANAL but I'd say you are wrong about this, your program would only be interacting with the GPL'd program, not incorporating it.
i.e. your automation program is not a derivative work.
Perhaps we should be working on easy-to-use interfaces that are intended for a higher target IQ and a bit more study?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Grandmothers are exchanging cookie recipes.
Children are being harassed daily by the same type of people who would try to kidnap them.
Rednecks say things like: "Maw, Paw done shot up the America Online again!"
oh, wait a minute, every one of these has happened!
{SARCASM}We're too late! We're DOOMED!{/SARCASM}
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Software should have a smooth learning curve to take you from beginner to expert. Too much of today's software has bumps in the learning curve.
For example, a beginner in Windows might think that the file hierarchy is rooted at "Desktop" with subfolders "Network Neighboorhood" and "My Computer", and applications like "Control Panel." Microsoft apparently did this to make some items easier to access. However, a user must eventually learn the true layout of the file system in order to make use of file pathnames. This is bound to lead to a step of confusion where the user realizes they have been tricked. If the file pathnames were consistent with the Explorer hierarchy (e.g. "Desktop\My Computer\C\Windows\Paint.exe", the learning curve would be smoother.
On UNIX we have nifty graphical desktops like CDE, KDE and GNOME. At some point the user will realize the power of the GUI is limited. They need more sophisticated capabilities like pipes. Well the only way to use pipes is from the shell. But to use those they have to cross a bump in the learning curve - they need to learn a lot about shell syntax before they can use pipes effectively. It might be nice if the user could get into pipes first via the GUI, by some graphical "connection" metaphor. Then the transition to the shell might be more natural.
"Microsoft Outlook uncompresses and executes e-mail attachment files automatically, saving individual users a small amount of time per e-mail message, but creating a huge security risk, which at the time of this writing is still a fundamental flaw in the software"
;)
Here the author tries to say that because MS Outlook express is easy to use, it therefore presents security hole.
I'm sorry my friend but this is bad logic. The security holes in outlook express are simply a design flaw. There are plenty of easy to use email clients out there for various platforms that do not suffer from this problem. This point is just plain weak.
The author has a number of suggestions at the end of his piece on how we can reduce peoples dependency on easy to use programs(!?!) which include education, encouragement, and basic design principles.
So to paraphrase and summarize Bradley Dilger, we need to make our people smarter, not our programs easier.
...and to that I counter:
Good luck buddy!
- Toby
I would agree that this is a good example "hiding the machine from the user", but this is just a natural progresion of computer science. Drum, Core, and Random Access Memory have all given spawn to their own file systems to help a user store and retrieve information from them. Extending this logic, one could say that a journaling file system "makes it to easy" and doesn't really teach the user about the computer they are using. Clearly, this is progress to welcomed with open arms.
Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not help him get to work in the morning.
If the product has a target demographic that is very diverse and crosses many differant educational levels, the interface should match the market.
What about BeOS? It's dead simple to use, but fairly powerful and stable. Security might be considered lacking if the intruder is physically present at the machine, but if they're that far, you're screwed no matter what the OS is.
Lets not forget that bootsrapping isnt just as simple as loading the kernel.
/sys/i386/boot/biosboot directory on any FreeBSD machine.
Under FreeBSD, booting is usually a three step process. The second stage loader must switch repeatedly between real and protected mode on the i386 so the size of the bootloader is limited to 64K. Sounds to me like it would be a real pain to implement an XML parser that could be included in the second stage bootloader to read config files written in XML. They even implement a very stripped down version of printf() just to make everything fit.
We are sacraficing something useful (a configurable bootloader) for something that is easy to use (a bootloader without a config file because the XML implementation wont fit into ram durring boot).
And just to be safe I'll site my sources. Check out the
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
If you read to the end of the article, it seems to talk more about "easy" software, like Wizards and the like, creating a legion of users who have no knowedge to do simple computer activities, like copy files.
I used to see it everyday, at my previous job. For instance, we had an excel guru, who many "tech" people in the company would go to for help when they needed to do a complex spreadsheet. This "guru" had a very difficult time with Novell NDS logins...just type in your password dumbass...and simple things like copying files, and understanding not to email 300MB files to remote laptop users (with modems.)
That, and his example of how people can manage files from within the application that creates them, but nothing else, are what really sum up his story.
Having worked in an envirnment supporting many non-computer literate users.
I agree fully with this article. Those of you talking about Linux/UNIX pervailing because of the ability to use both GUI, and CLI, are missing the point of the whole article.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
After going through the article, it seems that the real problem is not the computers are too easy/too hard, but that the students using them lack the ability to think abstractly. They will know how to follow the "cookbook" directions to upload a text file to the university website, but they are lost when it comes to uploading an image, or when they are asked to use the UNIX boxes at the computer center instead of their Windows boxes at home.
It may sound like a mean and cynical thing to say, but perhaps it's become a little bit too easy to get into a college in this country. I'll go even furthur to say that anyone who cannot think abstractly and refuses to expand his or her mind-view and learn new things has no business being in a college and should perhaps pursue a career in a field that does not require judgement or critical thought. Sadly, those jobs are disappearing.
In the end, each person needs to find the balance that is right for them. To have more configurability, they need to invest more time to do the actual configuring. To be able to configure in less time, they need to give up some of their configurability. This is a wide scale ranging from the Macintosh interface to actually programming an X application yourself. Obviously, actually programming the thing is the ultimate in configuration, but it takes the most time. On the other hand, using the Macintosh interface is much like watching a movie, you just sit back and watch without being able to change anything.
Given that I'm writing almost everything on my Win98 laptop from GNU Emacs, yes.
I have a very hard time typing more than a few sentences on other editors, like this web-form I'm using to type to you. [Part of me wants to go up a few lines (C-p) to make that a blockquote (C-d C-d ... C-e Meta-b Meta-b Meta-b ... C-n C-n C-n).] I find the off-home keys I want to use (End, Home, Page-Up, Page-Down, arrow keys) hard to hit without striking another key, and I want my convenient editor/movement commands (forward/backward one word, move to end/beginning of line, move text so cursor is at center of screen, multiple paste) to be ready from the home keys.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
No matter how easy you make it, some users still let their VCRs blink 12:00 [I never thought that I would actually have an application for using the blink tag, and now that I do, /. has it filtered :(].
The real art is a seemless merging of the levels. I think that the way to do this is do have some inner theme which 'does the work' and becomes apparent over time. You find yourself slowly unearthing the model that the programmer used, and as this happens you quickly gain control over the program.
TeX, (especially plain TeX), is a good example of this. First you learn to enter equations and text, using a fairly simple syntax for markup and watch them come out prettified. Then, at some point, as you try more things, and lookup more tutorial examples, you start to become aware of the \box concept. Eventually, you find that you can do anything with the right combination of \hbox and \vbox. In fact, TeX is mostly written in terms of them.
Suddenly, you can read most Plain TeX macro packages, and a good bit of the TeX Plain Format source. I was never a fan of LaTeX, because it adds a lot of other conventions and such to learn - put another way, the LaTeX learning curve has a longer flat part at the beginning, but seems a harder mountain to climb past that point.
The shape of the learning curve is, in my mind, the ultimate parameter for the software architect to get right.
'Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof,'
This all depends how that ease is obtained. This is no different from trading off power of a program against the speed or space resources it uses: of course you can make a program use fewer resources by making it do less. On the other hand, if done properly, you can often make it do *more* while using fewer resources.
Ease of use obtained by limiting your what you can do with the code, of course, necessarily makes this tradeoff, but that's just a straw man.
The difficulty of providing power while simultaneously delivering ease of use is overcome by excellent engineering. Real Ease of use obtained in modern software design is obtained by standardizing the general idioms with which many programs are to be used, and eliminating inconsistencies and awkward modalities that make software use more complex, not for the purpose of additional functionality -- but for the ease or ideosyncratic views of the programmer.
This latter "ease of use" actually empowers users, making it possible to do more, better and faster, without significant compromises.
Unlike the inherent conflicts between interactivity and fiction (where there is a true trade-off) one can at once offer a user consistency, elegance and power. It isn't as easy for the programmer to do this -- especially if the programmer is unfamiliar with user design issues -- but that isn't a relevant factor.
Ease of use is something for which we must constantly strive. Articles such as this simply offer lazy programmers excuses to rationalize shoddy engineering.
I agree that in an ideal situation, it items such as this _should_ be hidden from the user if possible. However, I don't think that Office has progressed to the stage where it is possible for the user to do certain tasks without using the "hidden" menus. Before the interface is "simplified", designers must ensure that it is still possible to do what was previously possible.
Here's my take: any operating system that wishes to be used on the majority of computers needs to meet the following goals: 1) power to accomplish any task 2) ability to be upgraded when required 3) stability to operate through various undesirable situations 4) various systems (ie user interfaces) to accomodate all levels of user experience and user requirements
MS works from a checklist of must_have items which have been gathered from discussions and contractual requirements over the years. This explains all the curious little things that are possible but not visible in the interface (or only with great effort.)
Ease is never free: its gain is matched by a loss in choice, security, privacy, health, or a combination thereof.
This sounds suspiciously like something out of an economics textbook: if you're at an equilibrium, utility maximizing point, you can't gain something without giving up something else in return.
However, the above is true only if you're at an equilibrium point, when all factors are in balance and you're forced to trade off one for another. The fact of the matter is, most software is difficult to use simply because it is poorly designed, with skill or little thought given to the end user experience -- end of story.
As a longtime Macintosh user, this subject is very personal to me. Because my OS of choice was "easy to use", some immediatly formed the opinion that I was a poser of a computer user, and a general ignorant know-nothing.
I don't think the author (Bradley Dilger) is against easy computing. The point he is trying to convey in the article is that easy computing is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Of course... the same is true with computing in general. The bottom line is that IT companies make products to accomplish things.
The underlying conflict underneath all this seems to be philosophical. If I ran a company, I wouldn't care if a data entry clerk could replace a burnt-out processor. That person's purpose is to enter data -- whether or not they understand how it shows up on the screen and gets saved is inconsequential to me. Its the techie's job to understand how the machine works, and the operators job to use it. A highly-educated user is nice but not always neccessary
Think about all the things around you that are easy to use, but in reality are complex. Your car for example.. does it really matter that most drivers don't know what the alternator does, or how a carborator works? Chances are they operate it just fine.
This is like that Simpsons episode where the Professor is trying to explain, to a kindergarten class, a blackboard full of physics that describe how a push toy works. A kid raises his hand because he wants to play with it, and the professor says "No! not until you can enjoy it on as many levels as i can"
GUI:
Granted, gui's have increased the acceptance of computers and made them more wide-spread. That's a good thing - yet, people are also loosing the ability to individually finesse all the options of a program quickly. ( Yes, I prefer the command line ).
Programming:
Programming has gotten way to gui'ized ( Hey, new word - I'm gonna patent it so don't use it.) and as such most programs now are over-bloated, overly complex. Look at office ( okay, bad example - bad company ), at any major application. Most ( not all ) are memory hogs and internally go through a very complex "model" approach when, because of their limited implementation and support scope, would appear fine to just directly approach it.
In summary: GUI != OOP. OOP != Great Programming.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
I've been hacker (!cracker) for almost 20 years now and for as long as I can remember there have been people moaning and complaining about computers being hard to use. But the plain fact is, computers are not hard to use, they are hard to learn to use. Just like anything else which requires skill, computers require time and effort to master. GUI's and other such interface advances work to make working the the computer less alien and confusing to a new person by presenting files and programs in terms of pictures or some other easily grasped analogy. But these don't make computers any less complex, all they do is hide that complexity. When things break, which they always will, the complexity hits you square on the nose. This is why most computer problems that come in to techs nowadays are software problems or pure ignorance on the part of the user, not hardware failures. Ten years ago the opposite was true. Once upon a time if someone owned a computer and used that computer, they had a pretty good idea what was going on with it. When things broke they had some chance of fixing it, and fixing it right. Today the average computer user is as oblivious to what goes on under the hood of their systems as they are of quantum physics. Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The reason why computer technology is like magic to the average person is that our culture has not caught up with the technology. Once it does the problem will solve it self. Cars are not mysterious things to most people. A person might not be able to rebuild an engine or even change their oil, but they have some idea what is going on in the engine compartment, and they aren't afraid of their cars. Of course there are always going to be people who are exeptions, but generally this is true. This is because cars have been a part of our world for almost a century. No one makes claims that cars need to be easier to drive. Instead everyone understands that driving is a skill and one that must be mastered over time. Once mastered, driving a car is second nature. This is exactly how it is with computers. In todays world computer literacy is every bit as important as the ability to read. There are few jobs other than manual labor where computers aren't used. They are an integral part of any business. As such they need to be effective tools. A computer is only as effective as the ability of a person to use it. Someone else once said that if you make a system even and idiot can use, only idiots will use them. I find this to be very true. Dumbing down a computer to satisfy those who are not willing to master it is ultimately counterproductive. In the end you have a computer that anyone can use, but which is not useful for much of anything. Great music is not played on a piano with 3 keys. Now I'm not saying that everyone out there should should be uber-gurus capable of debugging code in their head, in binary. But people should be able to make use of windows or the MacOS (or even Linux) and master the applications they use on a daily basis. The truth is they aren't going to get any easier to use in the future. With software companies constantly adding new features to their products to justify costly upgrade cycles every 2 or 3 years, software stands to become more and more convoluted. Now if the software companies were smart, they would spend their time and energy figuring out how to better implement the features they have now and make their software run more efficiently, but that is another issue. You can make something user friendly, or you can make it idiot friendly. The two are not the same thing. Making something user friendly means making it easy to use, efficient to use, even if there is an initial learning curve involved. Keyboard shortcuts in applications are a perfect example of this. They take time to learn, but once master they make a program far more easy to use. Making something idiot friendly means trying to remove or lessen its learning curve to the detriment of its usefulness. All technology requires knowledge and skill to make use of it. The sooner people understand this and work towards gaining that knowledge and skill, the sooner they'll realize just how easy computers really are. Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I agree that simplified design is a progression as apposed to a quantum leap. It's intuative to learn when you're faced with "old way =c:\winblows\desktop\mydocuments" and "new way=spiffy little button on the side".
You're also correct in your comments that this progression is a required step to move things forward. I think micros~1 has dropped the ball on this issue is they are moving forward, and forgeting the past. Relying exclusivly on the GUI and ignoring scripting, multi-user functionality, the CLI, and remote management, they have denyed users the "ease of use" they learned when they started learning computers.
In short, it's important to take steps forward in UI design, but don't throw out years of user training to achieve that goal.
In my experience, the easier you make computers, the stupider (some) users become. There are some people who have convinced themselves that they don't understand computers, and no matter what you do to make it easier for them, they will go out of their way to prove that they still don't understand. Very often these are smart people, but it's like they check their brains in at the door when they enter a computer room.
You're wrong about that - a trained GUI monkey can automate anything (s)he wants to in Python.
how in the world is a command line intuitive when you don't even know what the commands are -you just see a cursor (usually preceded by a $). A gui lets you show what you can do and how to do it without forcing you to read a manual. That's not to say command lines are bad-they offer tremendous flexibility when you need it. But 90% of the time I just want to get my work done and don't need the extra flexibility-a gui makes everything much faster (read: easier)
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If you look at the very bottom of an article (before the footnotes and bibliography), you'll notice that Dilger writes:
What he's saying essentially is that he is opening a formal enquiry into this particular subject. It's the beginning of a scholarly dialogue about the ideology of ease; understanding this can be greatly beneficial to both academics and programmers and developers.Should car makers include displays for compression per cylinder? Mixture? Exaust spectralnalysis? All of these items would be educational to the user and give the user a better understanding of how and why his car works, but it would not help him get to work in the morning
I don't think your analogy is quite correct here. The Microsoft Office "hidden" menus are hiding functionality that cannot be duplicated with other features. If you were talking about how Microsoft hides things like the status of the disk cache or the the number of free clusters or something like that, you'd be correct.
But what we're talking about here is more akin to car makers who might, for example, hide the cruise control buttons or the car's stereo behind panels for fear that new users would find them to difficult to use. Imagine walking into a car where everything but the minimal tools you need to get you to work in the morning were hidden behind panels. The only things visible would be the ignition, the shifter, the steering wheel, the pedals, and the speedometer. The fuel gauge, the temperature gauge, the stereo, A/C controls, cruise control, etc. are all hidden behind panels that must be opened first before they can be used. That's what MS Office is doing.
My journal has hot
Aircraft, even small general aviation ones, typically have a full set of gauges for this sort of thing. The fancy set is an exhaust gas temperature (EGT) gauge and per-cylinder head temperature readouts. The standard set consists of manifold pressure, RPM, oil temp, oil pressure, fuel flow, and fuel pressure. And these are just the engine related ones. There is a whole set of other gauges that deal with just flying and navigating.
Many of these are adjusted with manual controls -- mixture, manifold pressure and prop RPM affect all of them. And all of the controls must be used, as well as all of the gauges monitored in order to get to work in the morning.
The trend with automobiles is to reduce the complexity -- no tach, no oil pressure gauge, no water temperature readout, no extraneous dials to distract the driver. Just idiot lights that come on randomly (or not at all; who knows if it is burned out?). Plus it is less expensive to manufacture.
The big difference between the pilot and driver is that the pilot has received extensive schooling in the operation, navigation and emergencies. Understanding the aircarft is a base requirement. Meanwhile, on the ground, the driver was given a set of keys and told to go drive.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
Do you watch TV? Aha....stop that. You need to build your own TV first. Oh? Done that?? Ok. You also need to stop using your VCR - unless you designed it yourself. Unless you can produce a house design, I suggest you get out of your house. In fact, ya know, unless you have a Doctor of Commerce degree, you shouldn't be allowed to use money. Because you just don't have the economic understanding required. Sorry. You can't use your money anymore. You need a Doctor of Commerce degree. Seriously. Are you smoking something??
I see no reason why computers can't have several layers of user friendliness. When you're comfortable with one leve and ready to move on, you enable the next layer of complexity. Feel limited by xdm? Pull up a shell window. Feel limited by shell scripts? Hey, there's gcc. Feel limited by C? Run the assembler and hack away. Computers should never be "locked in" to a single user firendliness level. Even MS Office lets you turn that damned paperclip.
We cannot allow these information-bearing devices to become too accessible to the common-folk! These things will ensure the proliferation of knowledge to the common peasant who is simply incapable of interpreting knowledge for himself or herself. Such a profusion of knowledge in society will mean that power shifts from the elite to the mere commoners. Of which technology do I speak? Books....after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. Well, we can all see the disasterous effects that books have had on the education of mere commoners! This little passion play has been played...I think we all know the results. Now you can make an informed decision on whether to further an elitist agenda or enable another revolution of knowledge and period of enlightenment.
I think ease is good. If you write software there are several aims - ease of use, speed, functionality, flexibility etc. You will always write bad code if you just look at one of those, I really dont think many developers are doing this. Ease of use for me mainly means how fast I can pick something up. For example, as a professional sw developer for >=10 years, havving written a modeller in C++, I joined the effort to write an open source modeller in C++. Still, I had to learn SSH, CVS, SourceForge, Linux (the modeller works under Windo$ and Linux, but I want to test it under both), automake, (auto)conf, python, plib etc. If each of these had taken a few month to learn, I would still not contribute. So, event to a proffesional ease of use is important (apart from maybe a few tools he uses every day and that cant be made easy).
:-(. There are so many
unsolved problems. Why didnt they use an appropriate tool and used the time saved to
write a needed tool? For example a translator that doesnt produce gibberish or
a Go-playing program that beats a advanced human player? They would have got >1
million dollars for that. My Answer: They are not the great he-man-programmers they think they are.
Computers are there to solve problems. My problem is not that I want to learn (say) an operating system, but I want to write a modeller. Every tool I use for that should be as easy as possible. I often laugh at the people who on purpose use a hard-to.use tool, for example one they know is inappropriate for the job. Oh, I wrote that code to do xyz in abc - everyone knows writing such code with that language is hard, so I am king. What a waste of time
Anyway, enough of that rant, lets look at the article in more detail. I think it contradicts itself. The only main point I can really agree to is that there is still too much inconsistency. If I want, I should have the same or similar save-file-dialogs whether I am in the web or on the desktop, whether I am in Windo$ or Linux etc. One metaphor (he mentions the desktop-metaphor) should be used throughout. For me, a consistent UI is easier. So, the problem is too little easiness, not too much!
Also this shows, if stuff would get easier (in this case, more consistent) it would get more difficult to tie people to a certain setup - he writes the opposite.
Another contradiction in the article is that OToneH he says "An uncritical drive toward ease is arguably the most influential force in desktop computing today". OTotherH he says that we dont have consistent UIs because thats too difficult to achieve - well if this is my only aim (as he suggests), then the difficulty would not stop me at least trying. He, however says, they are not even trying because it is too difficult.
And IMHO another contradiction: He says easiness appeals to females, for males it is not important at all or only as a phase into more difficult things. Well, I think computers are still mainly sold to males, at least they were a few years ago and even then easiness of use was a major selling point. I think the author tries - unsuccessfully - to merge some of his general political attitudes (he also speaks about Marx) with his hate for easiness.
His main argument is that his students know how to use some very easy programms, but don't have general knowledge and therefore are unable to, for example, transfer files between home and uni. Does he think this would be different when developers put less importance on ease? There are several reasons why there is less "general computer knowledge" in an average computer user. Earlier on, there were fewer users who spend much time learning stuff etc. Either, we reduce the amount of computer users, or force them all to spend more time learning or we realize that not everyone can have a deep understanding of, for example the operating system. We have experts for that. When I started with the C64, quite a lot of owners had "C64 intern", the complete listing of the OS. I wonder how large such a listing would be nowadays and how long it would take one person to just get an overview? There were no worries about networks, security, GUIs etc. Of course people knew a higher percentage of the background, since it was so much smaller.
Another thing is ease of use of one program versus ease of use of the, say five programs a user uses regularly. For one program it might pay to hide the file-system from the user and have a simple UI instead. However, I only have to learn the idea of the file system once, so if (almost) all the programs use this, then overall it is easier to use to me. So, this example of his is in my mind not a question of ease versus general knowledge but of ease working with one programm versus ease working with the computer.
As I said in the beginning - ease is ONE of the goals one should have. To pick up his example, when making a power point presentation I can use templates, saving time, but maybe affecting the content if the templates fit badly. I think this is as it should be: The person doing the presentation can decide himself. He has the priorities, whether he needs to get it done quickly or perfectly. Also, only he knows how good the templates fit his problem.
Yes! This is a perfect example of how the interface matches the user and why the author of the article has a group of people that would be considered "general users".
a trained GUI monkey can automate anything (s)he wants to in Python
Provided the program you're trying to automate:
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
There seems to be a lot of effort going into turning the 20'th century's "smart box" into the 21'st century's idiot box. Far too many resources are being put into making computers less useful. Take the whole Real vs. Streambox thing: Real invested a huge amount of resources into making your computer behave like a stupid TV or radio and not allowing the most brain-dead simple function of actually saving a stream.
The lack of imagination of the suits is what really worries me. The original selling point of computers was that they can do virtually anything you program them to do, but it seems that people are content with what we've accomplished and now want to patent and sue and censor their way to keeping things exactly the way they are just so they can sell back to us what we already have for the rest of time. We haven't even begun to discover what we can do, but business doesn't seem to be in a rush to move forward if it's not something they can sell or pump advertizements through.
There is easy-to-use, and then there is easy-to-learn. They are often orthogonal. That seems to be especially true in computer UI's.
It seems to me that the MacOS is easy-to-learn, judging by the things the Mac-o-philes tell me. That is, you can easily get things done, without any need for any understanding of what is going on behind the scenes. That isn't really a bad thing, either, until you NEED to know what's going on.
That's where the author's example came in: the kiddies would use ftp, and not have a clue where the file wound up, or even that they had downloaded a file. They hadn't learned that you start an application, and then open a file... they had learned that you click on something, and it opens...
If you save a file somewhere on a Unix box, but don't know where, or exactly what the name was, you can use grep with regular expressions, or any one of a number of methods to search the directories where you have write permissions and find it. If you have that problem under Windows, there aren't any reg-exps, just ? and *. Reg-exps are hard to learn, but so powerful and easy to use. They just don't seem to fit the Windows/Mac way of doing things. This is the difference between easy-to-use and easy-to-learn In a Nutshell (hey, that's a catchy phrase, I should trademark it!).
I read that fellow's article,and I'm still scratching my head. I know that you have to salt a scholarly paper with some big words, and some obfuscation, lest people realize that you really aren't adding anything to the field, but this was ridiculous. What field is this guy in? The standards for content are very different than in Econometrica, or even American Statistician.
I'm really not sure what his point was, but I have the uneasy feeling that he had one.
Nels
See what I've been reading.
Your suggested filesystem layout (/apps, /docs, /system) looks very Mac OS-like (/Applications, /Documents, /System Folder)...
The first process the Linux kernel starts is init, the mother of all processes (in more ways than one). Sure, init can (eventually) read an XML-based configuration file that points to each of its daemons and each of their config files, but where will:
The kernel will at least have to be recompiled for these if we will be drifting away from /etc into /system/preferences like the Mac has.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
One of the problems is that changes are made to the OS at a fundamental level in order to (theoretically) make the "newbie" level easier to use. One example of this is moving configuration data from a text config file to a database. This makes it easier to set-up a GUI front end for tweaking the config, but makes it much more difficult to change things manaually.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Sadly, I think there is a grain of truth in what the author claims, but I would like to put it slightly differently:
I believe the constant "drive towards ease" is something we have to live with. They days when "computer literate" and "computer user" where close to synonyms are long gone. Today, almost everyone (in the industrialized world) has become a computer user. And it turns out that not even a recognizable set of user interface metaphors (such as the desktop metaphor that died with the Macintosh) is "easy" enough: There is still a learning curve, in a time when the learning curve is expected to be zero.
We live in the "wizard age"! The bewildered user is protected (from a poorly designed user interface) by a flood of wizard dialogues, falsely disguising any operation as "simple": Just click on the "Next" button until it disappears. In the end, the user has no clue as to what really happened - magically a mail account, Internet connection, or God knows what was set up. When something stops working, the wizard is gone and the user is left with only one option to bring him back: Reinstall.
Now, if all you want to do is use the machine, this inconsistent plethora of click-through interfaces is all you will ever see. And the sad thing is that the superficial computer knowledge you gain in this process apparently is sufficient for a vast majority of users, just look at what is really widespread out there.
Long live the idea of consistent GUI:s based on thoroughly designed elements! But the digital world of the masses doesn't want them and apparently doesn't need them.
Or maybe I'm just temporarily disillusioned. Someone please tell me there is hope.
It may be easy for people with computer knowledge, but some people are just forced to use computers even they never touch it before.
Consider an office environment, even call operators are required to use computers to search for information these days.
I converted a Windows NT network to Windows 2000 environment a few weeks ago and I got more than 10 staffs asking me to switch back to the previous environment as the step by step usage they wrote down were not working for them anymore and they cannot do any work.
This is a clear case on why many of the people shouldn't be using a computer.
My one complaint about the paper is that it's really poorly written. The author isn't bashing the idea of ease of use (indeed, he's advocating it, though not in its present form), but he himself needlessly complicates the text in what seems to be an effort to make himself sound smarter. Case in point: the comparison of current GUI theories to Marxism, and the outright strange rant on the "gender" of GUI's and iMacs. It really detracts from the piece. He should have just plain said what he wanted to say.
Anyway, the guy does bring up more than a few valid points. It's refreshing to see someone who realizes that ease of use and power are not necessarily tradeoffs, though for this to be so you need to put some real thought into your interfaces. What he's detracting is the mindless drive towards making interfaces ever-"easier" when in fact all it's doing is making machines harder to learn. He's pushing, it seems, for more standardization in any given system's GUI, and more consistency.
This is a Good Thing to see. Sadly, no one's gotten it right, recently. Apple can't even keep their own interfaces straight (in addition to their absurd belief that customization hinders consistency); look at AppleWorks 6, QuickTime 4 (OSX player), Sherlock 2, iMovie, and Final Cut Pro for a examples of that. These are their five most recent apps, and not one has an interface that matches with the operating system, or even each other. FCP's windows don't look like standard Mac windows (indeed, they look more like Windows), iMovie doesn't use windows at all, AW6 looks nothing like its predecessors, QT4/OSX only bears a superficial resemblance to the OS9 version (though admittedly the OSX interface is much improved), and Sherlock just plain doesn't look like anything.
Mind you, Windows isn't any better at this. Every app they put out breaks their interface standards, often adding totally new curveballs that they don't even let other programmers do for several months afterwards.
Gnome/KDE... an interesting pair. At this point in time, they've actually managed to keep their "official" app set consistent (particularly Helix Gnome, which has gone beyond the official app set but keeps their own stuff consistent). KDE goes further, by squeezing many non-Qt apps into its own mold, making these apps at least look (though rarely feel) similar to KDE's own.
The fact is, ease of use is a Good Thing; even this guy agrees. But when people try deviating from interface standards with no good reason, they only hinder things. At least, that looks like what this guy is trying to say (tough to read through the haze of "look how smart I am" crap).
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I do believe that some things, mainly related to configure servers and the security of workstatins and even more things. Should be hard to do.
Why? Because those are indeed hard things, that when you make them "easy", you are actualy hidding steps, droping less used options or even assuming important decisions or even hidding the function. All those things are simply making things harder in the end, and should be avoided.
In resume if something is hard to do, don't try to create a easy to use tool to make it look like an easy task.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Think about it and you'll see what I mean - too simple is different from too easy to use. If the UI lets you do what you want instantly with no need for excessive hunting about, and in a consistent logical way, its easy to use. If the interface lacks some function, or puts it in an illogical place for simplicities sake, its too basic. Big difference.
Game dev and music blog
My little brother uses computer as much as I did at his age. I knew a lot more of mine then than he does now, I had to just to make it work. I'm sure I'm not the only one to observe this. Largely, one learns things out of necessity.
- Kaatunut
This isn't meant to start a distro war, but the principles on discussion here are similar to my reasons for preferring Debian. It's notoriously not a particularly easy distro, since there is a bit of mental overhead involved with becoming comfortable with it, but once you are, it then becomes (in my non-flamebait opinion) the easiest distro to do really productive things in really quickly.
When I consider the term "ease of use", I always consider two versions of it. On the one side, I have the concept of, "Could my grandma use this without being able to spell computer?" On the other side I have the concept, "Could I, with a little learning, be extremely productive with this?" When both of those concepts are in synch, an interface is then truly beautiful. Programs that can achieve both aspects of ease of use are apparent for their rediculously simple intuitive interfaces, and their extreme usefulness in achieving their purpose. Some of the many examples of this would be xmms or gnapster.
I think interface designers need to start concentrating on finding ways to express usefulness in a simple intuitive manner, rather than simply following the philosophy of interface reduction to keep things simple. I suspect you could fill a doctoral thesis just trying to figure out what it means for an interface to be both powerful and simple. Links would be appreciated.
Why will people do this when
they won't sink money into a broken car if they don't think they can fix it?
they won't buy a home with a crumbling foundation?
they won't buy a television if they can't change the channels?
It sort of angers me when people buy a computer and then EXPECT it to be easy to use. It takes a little practice to use a standard transmission without lurching out of a stoplight. Why shouldn't computers be the same way?
Reducing human capital costs lowers barriers to entry, spurs competition that lowers prices, and increases market choice for the applications of an easy technology. A limited set of general skills allows most people today to accomplish a wider variety of tasks (simaltaniously) than ever before. Ease of use has critical economic implications, saving untold dollars in the world economy.
Any loss of performance at the upper end, can be managed in several opt-in ways.
1) professional product line (stick vs. automatic)
2) allowing users to opt-in to the advanced-user features and interface. (think "advanced options" buttons in an interface)
This is an interesting way to start a Sunday. :)
I've got to stress that the headline and snippet chosen here is NOT an accurate summary of my article. As I say time and time again in the article, I have NO problem with the general trend of computers becoming easy to use. My problem is that this ease is sometimes portrayed as the only way to do it, in a variety of different contexts, and by a variety of different agents. "Is it easy?" can become the only question asked, and that compresses the possibilities of computing for a lot of perfectly capable folks.
More on this very complex problem later... got a lot to do today. Thanks to everyone who has commented so far -- many of the points made are quite salient. I hoped to start an academic discourse about ease stuff; a Slashdot discourse is great as well.
best,
Bradley
Sure you can, after you learn C, the Unix APIs, X-Windows, and GNOME.
I agree that the Dilger article is mostly beef by-product, but he points out that inconsistency is the hobgoblin of inexperienced minds.
The problem is the "hack-uber-alles" mentality, where even users are an afterthought to the glory of the hack. A sado-machismo: if it was hard to write, it should be hard to use.
There is no reason at all that an easy-to-use tool cannot also be powerful. "Pushbutton warfare" is a rather extreme example of this principle :-) But too many sado-macho folk get an ego boost from mastering arcane, inconsistent, poorly-implemented interfaces. It would damage their egos severely to find out that a trained monkey with a Mac can do immediately what it took them a day to figure out on Unix.
Dilger's example of inconsistent file save dialogs is quite illustrative. There are perfectly good, standard, consistent open/save dialogs in Windows and MacOS. If you need a special feature, there are provisions to add it in a consistent manner. But sado-machismo programmers won't RTFHIG (human interface guidelines).
This inconsistency is rampant in games, where nearly every game has its own look-n-feel. Game GUIs rarely resemble their host operating system, even with mundane tasks like dismissing a dialog. Game programmers seem to take pride in reinventing the wheel poorly.
Sadly, the Unix world is years behind Microsoft, and a dozen years behind Macintosh, when it comes to thinking about users. Maybe Eazel will help, but it runs the risk of being shunned by hack-oriented programmers, or forgotten when the next GUI-du-jour comes along.
The fault is not with ease-of-use, the fault is with programmers.
Next week, we'll see if Unix is about to leapfrog Windows and even MacOS 9. Watch /. to see the ignorant hollerings of the sado-machismo progs.
-toddhisattva
ps: this isn't a troll, I can be much more provocative ;-) Rather, see it as criticism.
To quote : "Images are considered easier to understand and work with than text....The idea that images are less information dense or inferior to text starts earl with toddlers' picture books."
Now, I dont know about you, but I was under the impression that it is faster to digest information from an image than it is from text, and that that is the resaon why toddlers' books focus on presenting information via pictures.
Note that I am not saying that any one way of communication is superior to the other. Conveying information via text has a sense of formality to it : one needs to distill the salient features of an image to convey it in text, and this often brings a greater understanding to the recipient. On the other hand, there is a reason for the proverb "A picture is worth a thousand words" : the human brain is wired to accept information faster via images, rather than textual images containing the same info which need to be parsed prior to understanding.
And therein lies my principle objection to the essay. The author seems to be basing his thesis on this one point : that text is a simpler medium of communication of information. I disagree. I think it is just the opposite. I am not championing the superiority of GUI's vs the command line interface. I think that the example problem mentioned by the author (downloading files via ftp and not knowing what to do next) is a genuine problem - but it is a problem associated with the metaphors provided by the dominant GUI today : WinXX + internet. He has not shown that GUI's today are incapable of producing generalized understanding, or that there is a trend to sacrifice generalized understanding to the altar of "ease of use" - which is what he decries.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
It's going to hurt a bit. That's what I tell people when they say they want to "know" how to use a computer. There's a real gap between expectations and reality. A great many of the non-tech think that you can just "know" what to do, like a pill you ingest and suddenly you have it. The very same people would not ask my carpenter friend "I want to know how to do carpentry." They would say "I want to learn carpentry." They simply understand that it's a process of learning, that you can't just "get it" and move on to constructing complex forms. They realize that if they really want to learn carpentry, they have to get their boots, their old jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of work gloves and show up ready to get slivers, cuts, and maybe even yelled at by the foreman. They'd be doing only the simplest tasks to start. And so on...The point is, that with most "hard" skills, people are aware that they must count the cost of attaining skill. No matter how "user friendly" I make a saw or drill or whatever, you can still FUBAR your project with a simple mistake. You can use tools that skip/automate steps, sure, but you had better know and understand all the steps that are being performed automatically. If you don't, your results may not match your expectations.
It doesn't mean that you need to be able to read assembler to use Word. You don't need to know how to work on your car's engine in order to drive it. But you should know the basics of the fuel, transmission, exhaust, and suspension systems of the car. Just because your car has automatic transmission (it automates the steps of shifting for you for EASE), it doesn't mean you should not know at least that your car is changing gears as you accelerate. "I just step on this pedal here and it goes and the one over here to stop" would inspire little confidence in one's driving ability.
Likewise, you should know the basics of the filesystem, the OS, the hardware, even if you want to just make a spreadsheet. Hardware and software manufacturers have spread the notion that you do not. If it was a car instead of a computer, someone might get killed; with a computer people just "run over" their files. Oops.
Basically, I try to educate people that the reality is that if you really want to "know" how to use a computer, you're going to have to learn. And it can hurt. And it's easier for some to pick up than others. And you screw up. And who told you that it wasn't like that?
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
"I see no reason why computers can't have several layers of user friendliness. When you're comfortable with one leve and ready to move on, you enable the next layer of complexity."
Good point. However, most important for mindshare and marketshare, is how easy to use the "newbie" level is, because this is where the overwhelming majority of users will enter the system. If this level is sufficiently buggy, the new users will never bother to become advanced users, they'll just walk away. If the "newbie" level *requires* use of the power-user interface (like editing config files, or using the command line) to get basic things done such as modem setup, or printer setup, then, again, new users will never bother to become advanced users. Therefore, the most user-friendly level should have sufficient power to do the things that even beginning users need to do, easily, consistenly, and seamlessly.
Multi-level UIs is where OSes are converging. From the power-user side, the free *nices are adding increasingly easy to use GUIs - desktops and window managers. From the newbie side, the MacOS is layering it's extremely consistent, easy to learn GUI over a full BSD unix, with terminal windows/command line, bash, gcc, apache, etc. That's what MacOS X is.
But in order to succeed, an OS must ensure that the *easiest* UI level, the GUI, is seamless and easy to use. Power users expect, and can tolerate a little complexity, but most new users cannot, and it is from the legions of new users that tomorrows power users will come. If you want these future power users to end up on your OS of choice, then you need to make sure that the entry level UI on your OS is extremely consistent and user freindly. So far, the free *nices are not there yet. Much of this is due to the inconsistency of X application user interfaces on the one hand. On the other, it is due to the immature state of the free desktops, by which I mean, their failure to provide complete access to every sort of configuration a new user will likely need to do in a consistent, easy to understand way. Great progress has been made, but they're still not there yet.
The GUI may have become the interface for millions of computers, but for all the hype of "ease of use", the only things its given us are buttons, windows and menus. Not really "graphical". And DOS programs had menus anyway.
In fact, the GUI seems almost to have made things "worse". Consider that the 'easiest' interface is one, single, big button in the middle of the screen that says "click me". Very easy. Anyone can operate it. This seems to be the goal of GUI's, an interface that a clueless user can operate. But the problem is that the user remains clueless.
To overcome the cluelessness, we need to emphasise understanding. Think of all the mental maps you have stored up, that you rely on when using a computer. When I used to work at a university help desk, I found that the hardest part was transferring to the students the mental model that I had aquired through my own computer use.
But by the time they are asking for help, it is usually too late, and they just want to "print their assignment before the deadline". And long theoretical blurbs just send them to sleep (I was told that my 'Starter Pack' booklet that I wrote to try to explain the basics of computer systems, like networks, peripherals, software, and filing systems, was used as bedtime reading, for it's soporific effect). But they do need to know this stuff!
So every time there's a new task, they are still clueless, because they lack the understanding. Without a map, people will have no clue how to go about it. You can give them precise step by step instructions, but if there are any discrepancies then they will get lost. And so we get students who can't even find their own files.
Now I'm not sure about the Marx stuff, but I do think that Bradley Dilger is on the right track. We need to get people understanding. And the current GUI does not do this.
So often when we try to explain something and words fail us we will resort to drawing a diagram. Why oh why diagrammatic explanations are not used to their full in interfaces I don't know. But "Understanding Comics", by Scott McLoud argues that we undervalue pictorial thinking in preference for so called "left-brain" skills like english and maths. Rudolf Steiner schools have tried to redress the balance, with art being a valuable thinking" tool. I'm happy that Dilger sees this:
Too, images are considered easier to understand and work with than text. I'm thinking of W. J. T. Mitchell's notion of the "pictorial turn," a broad shift in culture which constructs pictures and images as more accessible and more vibrant and just plain better than text [9]. The idea that images are less information dense or inferior to text starts early with toddlers' picture books -- which in my elementary school library were all under call letter E for "easy". It continues today in fear of television, a caustic attitude toward serial-graphic narrative (what most people call "comics"), and a lack of support for the visual and the aesthetic in school curricula.
Our cultural bias against "right-brain" education has been carried over into the so called "GUI". Let's face it, it's not really a graphical interface. Heck, studies quoted in "The Trouble with Computers" by Landauer show that the GUI is no more easier or more productive to use than the old DOS ways.
We are missing the potential of using interactive diagrams that self-document the functions available and the structure of the informtation being manipulated. Sorry about the 'big fancy words', but I know of no prototype. And I don't mean to imply that such diagrams would be the ultimate answer. Some people prefer auditory clues, so there's potential for much experimentation.
No matter how 'intuitive' the GUI, or how simple the metaphor presented to the user there is always going to be a limit to how simple computers can be made. The fact is that computers are not simple machines. We may be able to present the user with a metaphor of a desktop with which they can relate to some extent but that covers approximately 1% of the filesystem space on most computers, particularly when a lot of software insists on hiding it's saved documents in it's own magic folder nestled away in the depths of the filesystem somewhere so that users don't even know where to start looking for it without opening it in that program again.
I think there is almost certainly a hard limit to the level of simplicity that computers can be reduced to and still remain a productive tool for people to actually get things done with. I don't know if this limit can be pushed down to the point where joe-average's grandma can pull a computer out of the box and start getting things done but at the same time I don't really see that as a worthwhile goal.
Almost every single thing we do in todays world requires some level of training, or some process or learning to become familiar with it. Ever seen bank staff trying to train people how to use an ATM properly? I see no reason whatsoever for computers to be exempt from this process.
What I see as needed is general training in the way computers work, not the way windows works, or the way MacOS works but the fundamental themes behind computers. Here's the disk, here's a directory, look inside and see the files...
Once people have a few basic concepts of the way computers do things it becomes a hell of a lot easier for them to realise that "Hey, this program has saved my file to a funny place on the disk" and either go find it, or reopen it using the original program and save it where they want.
Silver
Making something easy != making something less powerful.
Example 1) Maya. Maya has more features than most people will every use. However, it is easy enough for somebody with no graphics experiance to learn it.
Example 2) Photoshop. Photoshop has features that even pro designers can't find a use for. However, it is easy enough for someone to learn to use pretty well in a weekend.
Example 3) Truespace. 3D animation is a very powerful topic. However, Truespace makes it easy to use without limiting its usefullness.
The idea that making something more powerful means making it harder to use is an excuse used by crappy UI designers. The three programs I mentioned above have one thing in common: they gave good, inuitive UIs. Despite their huge power, their interfaces are organized all the features in a consistant way and without making the user feel overwhelmed. For example, the floating tool-palattes of Photoshop and customizable tool-bars of Maya allow you to use exactly the features you need, without feeling boggled by all the options. A bad example of UI design is Blender. Though hot-keys make it pretty efficient, it is no more efficient than Maya, and is infinately harder to use because of it's illogical and inflexible tool layout. Another example is Maya's MEL. It allows you to do complex actions through a language, and then attach those actions to a toolbar icon. This allows the user to use this powerful feature when they are ready too, and by integrating it into the toolbar, hides the complexity of the feature after it is coded. Truespace has another innovation. It extensivly uses context-sensitive right-click menus, thus allowing the user to quickly manipulate items without hunting through toolbars or memorizing hotkeys. These are examples of powerful programs that are fairly easy to use. Methinks that the guy who wrote this article had spent too much time with Blender, and thus his sense of reality was distorted. The bottom line is, that if a user-interface is well designed (even text files, for example, XFree86 4.0's text file UI is well designed, while modules.conf's UI isn't) then the program will be easy to use. However, just as good UI designers can make the hardest program easy to use, bad UI designers can make the simplest programs hard to use.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Of course, as the generations progress, you'll have the current generations that grew up with computers become the older folks which will have had exposure to computers most of their lives.
So in one sense, it's not just the computers that are getting easier, it's the people that are getting more used to computers.
Is it really necessary to move configuration data to a database in order to make it easier to set up a GUI front end? Wouldn't it be sufficient if the configuration text files: (a) had a consistent format; and (b) were all found in the same place in different Linux distributions? Isn't this what the Linux Standards Base is all about?
These are not rhetorical questions. I honestly don't know. I'm just one that currently believes that making Linux friendly for newbies does not necessarily reduce the ability of experts to configure and modify it as they will.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
"I think good UI is intuitable, i.e. users can easily use intuition to figure out how to accomplish a task."
The problem is that inituition can only go so far. At some point, one actually has to figure out the basics of how things work, such as moving, and copying files, what a program is, customizing users settings, etc. These things really can't be learned just by poking around. They have to be taught. The trick is not to make it so that the user doesn't have to be taught anything, but rather that the user has to learn a relatively small number of basic things in order to be productive.
If any BSD system includes some essential GNU tools of any kind, then I consider it to be GNU/BSD.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Besides, how would you advance over levels? Do a certain number of file copies to slay the boss?
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
Now, compare that to something like non-GUI UNIX. You can do excellent desktop publishing with it, edit things very efficiently, move among applications quickly, and deal with large amounts of data. But before you can do all that, you have to spend a couple of months learning a good text editor, learning some of the command line tools, learn some scripting language, and learn a text formatting language. That kind of stuff doesn't sell, in particular in a culture that demands instant satisfaction and that believes that democratizing technology means that you don't need any experience and anybody can be a "professional" by just buying the right computer (or camera).
But why worry about it? People who buy stuff that's easy to sell may not use their systems very effectively, but at least they drive down the cost for the components that other people use.
but you still want it in plain sight on that rare occasion you need it. Menus items are no different.
#define rantmode ON
New users to computers get to learn how to use the simple parts of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). They will eventually discover the maze of settings that the graphical interface provides and some, depending on their adventurousness will learn the odd CLI (Command Line Interface) command. While the GUI is easier to use, nearly all operating systems provide some sort of CLI. The exception that comes to mind is MacOS.
Aside: Nevertheless it is the Operating System that is easier to get to grips with and not the Hardware.
The vast majority of users who didn't get any exposure to computers prior to the evolution of the GUI usually have no reason to go any further and discover the hidden CLI, or the arcane command line interface with it's many commands, each with it's own array of parameters. Hell, why should they learn it? That's what software is all about.
While at school in the '80s and the first few GUI enabled computers were bought for the computer room - I knew it was the end of an era and nearing my final years I knew that there would be a whole generation of people who would never type anything other than documents. I came across one user once who was trying to change his keyboard settings. He assumed that these would be settings somewhere within MSOffice, since that was the only application suite he used that seemed to require a keyboard.
It's a whole new world out there, the GUI is here to stay and the career of the IT Knowledge worker is secured. hurrah!!
Thankfully the Linux/BSD/GNU/UNIX effort stands to cultivate hackers who still want to get to the inards of systems and those who will eventually learn the power of the Command Line or shell, which in turn should populate the world with a whole set of knowledgeable IT employees. La creme de la creme, so to speak.
I know some IT staff who never really used a CLI to any great effect. I expect most of them will be confined to Level 1 and Level 2 support until finding some kind of position in middle management to see out their years.
Cisco also come to mind. You can configure a Cisco router with Ciscos ConfigMaker product giving a practical GUI interface so that any idiot could configure the router. You need to have some knowledge of Cisco's IOS CLI, however, to even start to troubleshoot problems that will be encountered. Enter the CLI aware Level 3 Guru.
What is scary is what if Linux were to completely graduate out of the CLI and move to the GUI. Redhat is already distributing GUI-by-default versions of it's distribution. Is Linux going to be engulfed by a whole load of non-CLI aware users? Is this already happenning? It seems so.
Thats what they made Linux for.
I mean, what's the learning curve on Linux? Pretty high compared to MacOS.
Is Linux easy to use? It is for me. Same with other unices.
Is it easy for my mom? Heck no.. she has no idea what's going on. Steep curve.
MacOS has a shallow curve, but is it easy for me to use? No.. it would be difficult for me to do the things I want to do with a clumsy gui.
It's easy for my mom to learn; as it's geared towards her knowledge base.
If everything is done for you, you don't learn how to do anything.
Now, with the proliferation of GUIs for everything, we have any number of ways to accomplish one task. They might or might not be the same across applications, so users, who don't understand the underlying workings of the task they want to accomplish, get frustrated and confused. The GUI proliferation is supposed to be a boon to newbies, but that different applications can have substantially variable (to the newbie) ways of accomplishing the same thing has caused a lot of frustration. "So, can I just do this here like I did in Word?" "Er, well, no" "Why not?" "Well, because it's different here." "Oh".
Stuff like network troubleshooting, hardware configuration, etc is, I suspect, going to be annoying no matter what, but, having been "close to the machine", I have a fighting chance. A newbie, confronted with a slew of different metaphors for the same thing, may never make much progress.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.