Too Much Tech Makes End Users Blink

There's a strange, somewhat funny story in The Washington Post today about how technology is probably going to keep outstripping people's ability to deal with it for many decades to come. It's a long piece, but please bear with it to the end; that's where Jaron Lanier (who some credit with inventing the phrase "virtual reality"), whimsically suggests that, in exchange for being granted U.S. copyright protection, commercial software publishers should have to pay users $1 every time their product screws up. "Instead of hunting down people who smoke pot," Lanier says, "they'd be hunting down people who sell business software that crashes. They'd owe people a buck or go to jail. That's what Washington should be doing."

Comments

Only two sides to this story?

[goliard]

Why on earth does this article pit "engineers" against "people"?

Where do they get off making no mention of the managers who refuse to pay for real QA? Who micromanage their designers? Who insist "make it blue"?

Why is there no mention of designers who seem never to have heard the adage "form follows function"?

I confess more than a little irritation that "engineers" are taking the rap for their PHBs, for the airheads in marketting who care more about releasing a product at the right moment than whether that product is ready for prime time, for designers who care more that there's a cohesive colorscheme than that it presents the user with a compelling metaphor.

It has never been my experience that it was the techs on a project who wanted to get the project done faster rather than better. 99 times out of 100, management has to pry the techs' fingers from the code ("No, really, code freezes NOW.") Similarly, it's not the techs saying "gee, why waste the money on real QA specialists."

In my experience, coders have immense respect for usability (even those who don't know how to make it themselves) and robustness, but are never taken seriously when they say "no, that's not how we should be doing it; it would be better if...". To blame them as a class for the failures in robustness and usability of their code is salt in the wound.

Re:UI

[Mr. Slippery]

If we spent as much time learning about how people interact with technology as we do learning about how to build bigger/faster/better tech, we'd be light years ahead of where we are now.

I keep hearing about how we need all this human factors research to make computers usable, that interfaces must be "intuitive" and, most of all, standardized.

Then I get in my car.

Almost every adult in the USA can operate a car with little difficulty. Yet the interface is not intuitive - press one pedal to make it go, another to make it stop? Turn a vertical wheel to change horizontal direction?

And the interface is not standardized - a car may have from two to five different foot controls (at least gas and brake, maybe also clutch, parking brake, and high-beam switch), the shifter for an automatic transmission can be on the steering column or the floor, the headlight switch can be on the directional signal switch or on the dash...

So how is it that most everyone can drive? (Well, can operate the vechicle. People have many driving problems that have nothing to do with operating the vehicle.)

Partly it's because everyone is familiar with the basics through cultural osmosis - we grow up riding in cars, we see them operated on TV and in movies. And partly we expect and accept that a certain amount of training is needed; few people balk at the idea that a few dozen hours of classroom instruction and supervised driving are a requirement for basic competence.

Why do we expect computer software to be different?

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/