Donald Norman On Software And Other Things

small but... writes "New Scientist has published an interview with Donald Norman in which Norman comments on open source (disparagingly), usability (of course), machine 'emotion' (Ha!), and security (Breaking news: social engineering still #1 risk)."

Comments

disparagingly?

[djradon]

I don't know if I'd call Don's assertion that UI design is best done by a "tyrant" disparaging. Maybe he's on to something that open-source needs to adopt?

IMO, ideally, open-source will allow any user to be his own tyrant, by separating content from implementation via open data standards (file and interchange formats) and distributed data storage and synchronization.

Re:disparagingly?

[Sunlighter]

I don't think Don understands that the Linux kernel is "dictated" by Linus Torvalds and Perl is "dictated" by Larry Wall, etc.

Yes, there is a threat of forking. But that's what keeps these "dictators" honest.

Hooray for Gross Generalizations

[ebbomega]

The fact of the matter is the only people that I've seen that haven't been able to comprehend what's going on on their computer screen are technophobes and luddites. Which brings us to a simple gross generalisation to go along with all of the ones put forth:

If you're willing to embrace technology, then you'll be willing to learn how to use it.

Explaining the concepts behind a GUI aren't that hard. This is a "Mouse". See? It's got a little mousey tail! When you move it, that thing on the screen (it's called a cursor) moves.

Now, when you put the cursor over something and click with that left button it's calling "clicking on" that item. If you click it twice real fast, it's called (You still with me?) "Double Clicking".

Double Clicking opens up this program. This program is called [foo]. It does [bar].

Done. And suddenly my grandmother can check her e-mail.

Granted, the setup is a bit more complex than that, but these days we have plenty of professionals to not just guide you through that, but DO IT FOR YOU! Concept.

I don't think the Internet is badly designed. It's a data haven (almost... or at least was). Lack of rules means that anybody willing to put in the effort of wading through noise can get to anything in said haven.

Having rules, structure, and protocols so limiting as to make the internet "user-friendly" or any shit like that limits what you can do on the internet. Don't believe me? Go ahead. Try to use AOL to find copies of the Anarchist's cookbook without using the unspecified and user-unfriendly "Web".

Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this guy's "emotional" angle is way off. It seems like some fantasy-land Star Trek stuff:
"Computer, create an adventure in the Holmes style, with an adversary capable of defeating Data." and pow, new life form on the holodeck.

Just because you *feel* a certain way, doesn't mean you shouldn't have to know, or understand, anything to make a contraption operate correctly, or complete useful tasks in a way that meets your expectations. It seems like those Apple switching ads where they celebrate ignorance.

Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations

[Kaiwen]

the only people that I've seen that haven't been able to comprehend ...

You haven't seen too many people, have you? There are plenty of folks who neither fear nor oppose technology -- not a few, in fact, who recognize its value -- yet who, nonetheless, are hopelessly confused by it.

This is a "Mouse". See? It's got a little mousey tail! When you move it, that thing on the screen (it's called a cursor) moves.

Ignoring for a moment the condescending tone of your remarks, in fact, recognizing the correlation between the movements of a mouse and an onscreen cursor is not as automatic for many people are you assume. Like learning to throw a ball, it's actually a quite complex physiological-mental process which can break down at many points. Sure most folks -- especially those of us who have been using computers for any length of time -- think of it as the simplest of tasks, but easy does not mean automatic, and we must not lose sight of that fact.

If you click it twice real fast, it's called (You still with me?) "Double Clicking".

Don't get me started on double-clicking -- one of the stupidest GUI design decisions in Microsoft's less-than-illustrious career. I can't count the number of users I've worked with who just can't -- for whatever reason -- complete a double-click. Some are unable to hold the mouse steady enough between clicks. Others can't complete two clicks fast enough for the computer to recognize the "double" in "double-click" (yes, you and I know both of these settings are configurable; how many Joe Technophobes would?).

And why the left mouse button? Why not the right? Did you know many people have difficulty distinguishing between left and right? Did you know men are better at it than women?

Apple got at least this much right -- give them one button, and don't make them push it more than once. But, for my money, a touch-screen is still the most intuitive interface.

Double Clicking opens up this program. This program is called [foo]. It does [bar].

You mean if I want this computer to do something I have to open a "program"? Why? Why can't it just do what I want it to do?

And suddenly my grandmother can check her e-mail.

Yeah, sure. All she has to do is learn what a mouse is, figure out how to coordinate its movements with an onscreen cursor she may or may not be able to see, remember which button to click and how many times to click it, remember to hold it real steady while she's clicking it, figure out what an icon is and which blasted one represents e-mail (whatever that is).... And that all assumes she even understands why she should care. "If I want to talk with someone", she might say, "what's wrong with the phone?"

Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC

Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone has confidence, but even those without it can learn if they so desire. I've known secretaries that are experts at Word but couldn't tell you how to build a resume with it, so I think part of older people learning computers has to do with necessity. My grandfather has a computer for what? Email. Everyone mails everyone else all the time instead of phoning them. Sure, there's the occasional voice call but it's not as frequent (or as inexpensive) as email.

Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations

[aluminumcube]

Double Clicking opens up this program. This program is called [foo]. It does [bar].

You mean if I want this computer to do something I have to open a "program"? Why? Why can't it just do what I want it to do?

Actually, as an open source noob, I have to say that the whole 'program Foo' that does 'Bar' is probably the most danuting aspect of the whole community to me.

So many Open Source programs have the dumbest, most unintuitive names ever. Gnome? What the hell is that supposed to do with a GUI? Evolution? Evolution of what? Even Apache... what does a famous tribe of indiginous American peoples have to do with serving web pages?

At least if you call your shiny new advanced ground attack helecopter "Apache", you can draw some comparative to the native tribe's famous warfighting abilities.

I think the whole silly OSS naming problem is indicative of the community's general lack of concern for making useable software. For the most part, OSS fosters a community of like minded individuals who have a passion for tinkering, which is a great thing. Unfortunatly, this same passion and focuse tends to alienate those of us who aren't quite as talented with the command line or aren't willing to invest a huge chunk of time in trying to figure out lots of technical minusha to simply get our computers to work.

Uhhh

[mav[LAG]]

Is there anything that could have been done in design terms to stop 11 September from happening?

I don't think so. As far as I can tell, no mistakes were made. There were no practices in place that weren't followed.

He's joking right? It's kind of hard to tell from the context whether he's talking about facial recognition and 9/11, or just design in general and 9/11, but I for one am in the camp that says there was a massive failure to follow best practices by many of the US authorities before and during 9/11.

Re:Uhhh

[jimfrost]

Actually there was no breakdown on September 11. The tools they used to take over the plane were allowed at the time, and really aren't that big of a threat anyway. If the box cutters had been found by security they would have allowed them to pass. Security was interested in massively destructive weapons (explosives, guns) because those were what were considered to be threats, and no such weapons made it through security on September 11.

What the hijackers did that was special was take advantage of the psychology that had been drilled into airline passengers over decades, namely that if there's a hijacking you stay put and let it play itself out. That allowed a small number of hijackers to control a large number of people using primitive weapons that otherwise would not have been much of a threat.

This worked in the past because previously hijackers weren't committing suicide, and live passengers were to their benefit. The September 11 hijackers were playing by different rules.

In being successful at it they changed the psychology of airline passengers. We will not see another September 11 because the passengers will no longer sit around and let hijackers have their way. In fact, the technique didn't even last out the day ... as proven by the crash of the flight in Pennsylvania, and later by the shoe bomber. We could use exactly the same security procedures we used, with the same effectiveness, as before September 11 and such an attack would not succeed today.

It's easy to blame the airline security people, but this was really an exploitation of mass psychology ... a social engineering hack if you will.

Eg. Newton versus Palm

[cwernli]

One of the best examples to explain "usability" is the comparison of the Newton and Palm "graffitis": whilst Newton required the machine to learn from the user, the Palm handled it the other way round.

Not surprisingly man is better at learning stuff than a machine - therefore even grandmothers can cope with the Palm input method after ten minutes, whilst a lot of experienced users simply gave it up with the Newton.

The "intuitive" grail...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be of a similiar mind as this man and have become less so as I've progressed as an engineer. Is it that I've drunk the Kool-Aid and now want to go around making users live's hell? Somehow I doubt it. Instead I've come to understand that an "intuitive" interface is a false Holy Grail.

For one the only things that can be made "intuitive" are those that humans can do "out of the box" (i.e. ape-like behaviors). Sure a Segway has the most intuitive interface imaginable by exploiting the way our will effects our balance, but what if the Segway could fly? Suddenly the Segway's neat biofeedback trick would fail simply because there is no natural in-born parrallel. The office doors alluded to in the begining of the article can't ever be intutive because a door is an unnatural construction. Beyond that in case "ease-of-use" gurus haven't noticed men cannot unaided, fly, communicate over distances of thousands of miles, travel faster than 15mph, or harness nuclear energy.

Two, an interface being "intuitive" is an incredibly cheap, short term win. Wow! You can drag and drop, congratulations. Now move a thousand bitmaps... hmmm bet you wish you'd spent the twenty extra minutes it'd take to learn "cp *.bmp" and the other console commands. The above sounds like an elitist comment but is it elitist to want your average person to learn to read? To drive? The average user spends hundreds if not thousands of times more effort and time learning those skills.

All of this is not to say I'm for dismissing contemplative interface design, I think ergonomics and efficiency should always be a design goal. I'm just against the tone of most of the UI people and some of there most common assumptions.

I still don't get where that idea comes from

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

Isn't there a tyrant in every OSS project? I mean, Linus is the king of Linux, he just happens to listen to the parliament a good deal. Someone has to initiate a project, and you're free to fork if you don't like it.

Feels like another misconception to file next to "Open Source doesn't make money!"

Re:I still don't get where that idea comes from

[leandrod]

> Isn't there a tyrant in every OSS project?

No. Apache, GNU/Hurd, Gnome are just some examples of free software projects owned, developed and maintained by committees.

The tyrant vs committee thing is just a thoughtless, misinformation propaganda sound bite. The real points are:

Trade-offs. MS-W32 useability was traded-off against security and freedom, Mac OS X user-friendliness was traded off agains popularity and freedom. This are trade-offs that should never have been made. It would be better to have less popular and less friendly software, granted it was fundamentally sound. This would have allowed for building better user interfaces in due time.

End-user focus. The Linux kernel, the Apache server, and many other projects simply have no business with the naïve end-user who wants a Graphical User Interface. This is a business for Gnome, GNUStep, KDE, Motif and the like of them.

dictator? how about a triumvirate

[stdarg]

I've always thought the design process goes more smoothly when you have a small close-knit team. Having one person acting as a dictator can be good if he knows everything, but in practice the added knowledge a 2nd and maybe 3rd person bring to the table can outweigh the increase in bureaucracy.

"Why can't it just do what I want it to do?"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why can't it just do what I want it to do?"

The same reason why you have to tell your dog to "sit" in order to get it to sit, instead of the dog "just doing what you want it to do".

The same reason apples need to be detached from trees.

The same reason you have to turn on most faucets for them to give you water, open refridgerator doors to get at the cold items, turn knobs to open the doors in your house, turn keys to start your car, etc.: machines are reactive, not proactive.

Even automatic doors in supermarkets or airports, or the water faucets in some airports or movie theater bathrooms, are reactive: you have to intetionally trigger a sensor, if you intend to get a result. If you don't trigger the sensor, you don't get the reaction that results only from triggering the sensor.

You have to communicate your desires, if you want to stand any chance of having them fulfilled.

-- Terry

Re:"Why can't it just do what I want it to do?"

[Pogue Mahone]

...turn knobs to open the doors in your house...

And on the subject of doorknobs - anyone who has ever tried to open a door with both arms full of sleeping toddler, or who has arthritis and cannot grip very well, will tell you all about the usability of the doorknobs that Mr. Norman seems to advocate over the "british" door handle that he always seems to catch his sleeves on.

Interesting read until I hit this...

[CreamsicleSeventeen]

"Is there anything that could have been done in design terms to stop 11 September from happening?"

What the fuck? Just who the hell decided that question could be pertinent to anything? Less "intuitive" airplane controls? Velcro instead of shoelaces for FBI agents? Is there nothing in our culture that can't be profaned in the media? What's next for New Scientist? How the internet could have saved Princess Di?

Tyranny of the stupid

[Beautyon]

I don't see how that could come about from open source software

I cant imagine it, so it cannot be done. Riiight.

Design by comitee, by definition, should work better than design by a dictator because it will satisfy the problems that many people percieve, and not just the solve the pet peeves of a single deranged man.

The problem so far has been that the interface designers have a total understanding of the systems that they are trying to interface to people that have zero understanding. What is needed are many, many, focus group sessions to create an OSS interface guidlines document that everyone can refer to (or not) when they build thier applications. Arent Gnome doing something approaching this?

What has been lacking so far is the will to adress this problem. If it were suddenly to become the central focus, OSS would more than likely leap past the other solutions, because it can freely experiment with the tools, test with hundreds of thousands of volunteers until something really usable, in the broadest sense, is created.

Re:learn to think

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that although the GUI was a brilliant invention back when the problem was "How do we create a computer that can be used and understood by people?"; the GUI took a common situation (The workplace) and put it on a computer. Look, instant metaphor!

The problem we have now, though, is that the metaphor has become the reality, and it isn't a metaphor any more. Keep documents in a filling cabinet? Thats like saving a file to the network drive. People don't think in terms of the metaphor any more, they think in terms of the computer.

So theres the problem (As I see it). Computer designers no longer have a metaphor to base their designs on. Its self referential (Where do you place a file if you want to keep it? Uh, on the file server. Darn!).

What we need now is a way to go beyond metaphors. Yeah, should be easy....

this is a dead end

[g4dget]

Norman rightfully complains about the poor usability of current systems. He diagnoses a lot of microscopic problems and admonishes companies to spend more time on fixing their products. But that's no real solutions: companies don't have the time or money.

Just look at the stuff coming out of Apple (where Norman used to work): sure, Aqua is a little nicer than Windows and has somewhat fewer blunders, but, believe me, it's not intuitive to the uninitiated.

The problem is that making usable programs is too much work and is too rigid and centralized a process. That's a technological problem, not an HCI problem, and until it is addressed, HCI design of the kind Norman prescribes is just like flailing in the water: it may keep you alive for a little while, but it is enormously exhausting and largely ineffective.

Door Handles?!

[the bluebrain]

From the article:

• But in Cambridge I became so frustrated with British water taps and switches and door handles - those awful sideways handles on many British doors that catch your sleeves

Everything else aside, including the silly taps often found in the UK: round door handles ....

I figure that any way to implement a user interface requires thought, many many decisions, and yes, chucking a lot of stuff out. In the end there is one, maybe two ways to do something, which should be "intuitive", based upon what the designer figures the user's background is. However, this also implies that there are tons of ways the user can't do something (obviously), and (not so obviously) a bunch of stuff which can't be done at all - or rather, combinations of things.
But now to the case in point:

In the UK (and most of Europe), I simply can't "slide" by a door without running the risk of getting my sleeve caught. This is quite true. People get by this "bug" by habitually opening the door just a little bit further than absolutely necessary.
In the US, however ... (this is where I start telling a story) I'm sitting in the dining room and realize that there's nothing to drink on the table. I improvise a poll as to what Anne, Bob, and Carla want to drink, go into the kitchen, and fill four glasses with beverages-of-choice. I grab the glasses (two in each hand - assume that the glasses are well-designed enough to allow this mode of interaction - perhaps they even have handles), turn around, and am confronted with a closed kitchen door - either because a draught slammed it, or it's spring-loaded (to avoid having kitchen smells wafting throughout the house). I extend my hand, already containing two glasses, toward the handle, and ... aaaaargh! Elbows, man, these yanks need some fusking door handles that can be operated with an elbow!

[end rant] - 'course, this would never happen to a USian, because they would unconsciously take it into account before even grabbing the glasses.

sigh. (Same rant goes for separate "cold" and "hot" faucets in the UK. Anyone want to suggest implementing a separate "warm" facet between the two? :)

(Karma is here to be used). More on-topic: one thing I was missing in this interview was the fact ("postulate"?) that in any user-interaction-system, the human is by far the most flexible, adaptable element. History is littered with atrocious design decisions, which don't even make it into the consciousness of user's minds anymore, because the users have learned to use them, and have got completely used to them. For instance:

• Does anyone else remember the first couple of minutes of using a steering wheel in a car, after several years of riding a bicycle? I, for one, remember steering a bicycle to be intuitive, but having to consciously learn how far to turn the wheel of a car in order to make it turn at the desired raduius
• Computer mouse, as discussed further up in the thread. Here, just watch an uninitiated user, the first time they use it. It's only simple once you've got used to it
• Rotary phones. These have been superceded by touch-tones, and it was a mechanically elegant design at the time they were invented - but the UI still sucks
• Basically anything you had to learn how to use, rather than: if you know what it can do, it is obvious how to make it do it. Old MS interfaces, rather a lot of today's open source interfaces, some old tape decks (hold down "record" and "play" at the same time to make it record), keyboards (who wouldn't prefer a really good voice interface?), and so on ...

My point is merely that considering the above, I have as much appreciation for good UI design as the next person, but that humans were practically "built" to be able to handle a wide range of "UIs", and if what a device does sucks, then no amount of UI-candy with "un-suck" it. A bit like music: I'm happy to allow other people to make it, I appreciate it immensly, but it the artist has nothing to say, then no good voice, good producer, or ultimate fidelity will make up for that.

Re:Door Handles?!

[Mr.Sharpy]

The door handles comment was really kind of shallow on his part. He fails to recognize that in reality, for some people, round door handles are impossible to use. Take for instance people with arthritis or other disabilities that result in reduced grip. Grasping a door knob to turn it can be painful at best, assuming it is possible at all.

This sort of oversight really shows the downfall of usability design dictated by a single person. That which is easy and convenient for one person, may be impossible or painful for another. A single person controlling design and function may be effecient, but that does not necessarily translate to better. It can also lead to insensitivity to the needs of those who do not conform to the ideal user the lead person has in mind.

Re:Donald, you make no sense.

[Planesdragon]

Which logic led you from the 1) to 2) - the fact that you believe that one clever mind makes the best design - do you mean like Hitle, Mussolini or Stalin ? It would seem more logical to go into the conclusion that a larger open mass evolves and fixes problems, instead of getting stuck into one fixed way of thinking.

Creating something new takes one person. Greatness comes from single-minded authoirty reaching for the stars. Single people (or the rare closely knit small group) are ideal for this.

Committees, on the other hand, are great for catching mistakes and keeping horrible errors (Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin) from happening.

In OSS, we've got the committee in the form of the userbase / hobbyist coder. What a successful project needs is a dictator, to get the impressive ideas down.

Re:Tsk tsk tsk

[schnell]

The thing is, there isn't a thing that can't be done, *now*, in free software.

Riiiiight. Don't you *really* mean, "there isn't a thing that I do that can't be done?" You seem like a smart person ... you can't really be ignorant enough to think that there's a free software solution right now for everything?

As an example (the esoteric and tiny niche market of "desktop publishing"), let's take the graphic designers I support and replace their regular coffee with GNU/Folger's Crystals:

DESIGNERS: Hey, where's Photoshop?
ME: You have something better now, called the Gimp. It's Free.
DESIGNER #1: That's great. Why can't I work on this image with a embedded CMYK color profile? Professional printers require CMYK separations.
DESIGNER #2: And why don't I have pro-level color correction and matching across the entire system?
DESIGNER #3: And where are my multiple master fonts, or fonts with professional ligatures and weighting?
ME: But you don't understand, you don't need those things! Your software is Free now! You can look at the source code!
DESIGNERS: Oooh. (they look at it for a minute) So what? Is that, like, weird poetry? Their punctuation is all wrong.
ME: So you can modify it if you want to do all those things!
DESIGNERS: So how do we do that?
ME: You just need to learn C++ and programming with a GUI toolkit, plus a few other things.
DESIGNERS: I thought the idea was that people pay us to design things because we're good at that, and we pay other people to make software that does the things we need, because they're good at that?
ME: (sigh) What, do you people just not get it?

Look, I love free software and I am a great proponent of it where it is suitable ... but claiming free software is suitable everywhere is just as wrong as claiming that MS software is suitable everywhere.

Open source != design by committee

[jimfrost]

I think he has a big misconception as to how design work happens with open source. It isn't the whole internet getting together to decide what is the best way to do things. If that were the case nothing would ever get done at all. Rather, open source is more of a democracy deciding which of many dictatorships should win.

In other words, we have many independent developers who each exercise complete control over whatever they're building, many of whom are building things that compete with other versions of the same thing. The version most people use wins.

Whether or not this is going to result in more usable software is debatable, but one way to become popular is to be easier to use than the next guy.

Re:Tsk tsk tsk

[MoneyT]

I think the main issue that he's trying to get at here is, despite it's short commings, proprietary systems have one thing that OSS for the most part does not. A simple all in one package. The solutions you're providing are workarrounds and more effort than is required to just install the original application natively.

As techies, we often forget that the end users, the ones we are trying to educate and free, are lazy people. They have no desire to install an OS, install a work arround and then install the application and hope and pray that it works. They would rather take the easy way out. It's the same argument that was used often against macs, they didn't have the software people wanted in a commercial easy to find form.

Let me try to put it into another analogy. You have 2 cars. In one, the engine uses completely standard parts, runs as well or better than any other engine out there, and can be serviced by any person who takes the time to sit down with the included manual and read it. The only downside to this engine is that in order to start it, you need to turn a crank to build a charge in the battery, you need to prime the engine and then you need you pull the rip cord to get it started. Once it's started it runs beautifuly though.

The second car uses completely proprietary parts and if anything ever goes wrong, it has to be taken into the shop and serviced by trained professionals. Yet to get this engine going, all you need to do is insert the key and twist.

People into machines and the nuts and bolts of how things work will choose the car with the first engine a proclaim it's superiority from the tops of mountains. But, everyone else, the people that just want to get from point A to point B will choose the card with the second engine. Because to them, the amount of freedom they gain from having engine 1 does not outweigh the added hassle. ANd so it will be with OSS. Untill the hassle of using the software is insignificant compared to freedom, the people will not care. It's sad, it hurts some people in the long run, but unfortunately it's life.