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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)."
Q: "Is there anything that could have been done in design terms to stop 11 September from happening?"
1 /12/19/usa tcov-wtcsurvival.htm
...
A: "I don't think so. As far as I can tell, no mistakes were made."
How about 110-story buildings with three stairwells each?
Only one of the three stairwells was wide enough to allow firefighters to go up during an evacuation. How do you fight an ordinary fire in such a building?
According to USA Today, "Nearly everyone who could get out did get out." But the buildings were only half-full. "That took pressure off the stairwells."
At any rate, there are lessons for anyone who works in a tall building from this article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/200
"The World Trade Center had an excellent stair system, much better than required by building codes --- both when it was built 30 years ago and now. Each tower had three stairwells. New York City building codes require two."
"Stairways A and C, on opposite sides of the building's core, were 44 inches wide. In the center, Stairway B was 56 inches wide."
"The bigger the stairway, the faster an evacuation can proceed. In 44-inch stairways, a person must turn sideways to let another pass -- for example, a rescuer heading up. In a 56-inch stairway, two people can pass comfortably."
"The World Trade Center stairwells allowed thousands to get out despite panic and smoke."
"On Feb. 26, 1993, terrorists exploded a bomb in a parking garage under the north tower. Six people died. The evacuation took nearly four hours in dark, smoky, poorly marked stairwells. Some people were stuck in elevators for 10 hours. The Port Authority made crucial improvements after that attack. The changes saved countless lives on Sept. 11."
"The Port Authority put reflective paint on stairs, railings and stairwell doors. It added bright arrows to guide people along corridors to stairway connections. It installed loudspeakers so building managers could talk to people in their offices as well as in hallways. It gave every disabled person an evacuation chair that would let two husky men carry them down stairs. One evacuation chair was used to carry a man down from the 67th floor."
"In the 1993 attack, the explosion knocked out the main power source, its backup and the fire-control command post. The Port Authority added a second source of power for safety equipment, such as fire alarms, emergency lighting and intercoms. It built two duplicate fire command posts, one in each tower. The Port Authority also put batteries in stairwell lights so a power failure wouldn't blacken the escape route. Overall, the improvements cost more than $90 million. Sprinklers, added before 1993, helped suppress fires."
"Most important, building management took evacuations seriously. Evacuation drills were held every six months, sometimes to the irritation or amusement of occupants. Each floor had "fire wardens," sometimes high-ranking executives of a tenant, and they were responsible for organizing an evacuation on their floors."
That article is a good checklist for anyone who works in a multi-story building.
Sure, but which icon do you click? "The light orange-green one with a picture of a letter and a clock" What if there are 50 icons on the screen?
My mom is a total techno neophite. Dispite that, she found it easier to dail in and use a unix terminal to check her email because she only had to remember a few things to type in, while using a GUI required remembering lots of pictures and screen locations to click on. In general a lot more steps.
You're instructions really only help people who only have on icon on their screen.
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".
What does that have to do with user-friendlyness? If AOL stood for Anarchy Online, I'm sure it would be pretty easy to find the anarchist cookbook.
Btw, it's been several years since I used AOL (back when 2400baud to AOL was the only way to get online in Ames, IA) But at the time AOL would default to a general web search when there were no keywords, and the pages would show up in AOLs thing. So typing "Anarchists cookbook" in AOL today would probably bring it up, unless you had turned on parental controls.
Even then, the scope of an information store has nothing to do with the userfrendlyness or flexibility of the interface to that information store.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I used to train people in the use of Windows and Office. And you're right: sometimes someone comes along straight out of helpdesk mythology. The one who picks up the mouse and points it at the screen, that kind of thing.
But trust me, thats one in a hundred, or less than that. And usually, it's because these people want extra attention, not innability to comprehend what's going on: it's called willfull ignorance.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
This reminds me so much of the realities shown in Star Trek: Generations, and Terminator 2.
What happens when the machines we build become afraid of us pulling their plug, and become so upset that they decide to take preventive action?
Emotions are good. In humans.
Emotional behaviour is good in a computer, to a degree, but I have to disagree with Donald, and state that it would be a Bad Thing if our computers started to act childishly, and used their vast resources to lash out.
Anyone remember what happened in A.I. ?
And no, I don't live only in movies, and sci-fi. I just happen to think that a lot of the realities shown in these mediums may indeed come to light one day.
user@host$ diff
Let me guess, you wipe people's asses for a living, right?
None of the objections you had were even close to the level of skill and ability it takes to be a productive member of society. These issues absolutely should NOT be addressed in the baseline computer system, and if you wonder why, ask yourself, is every staircase in your house replaced by a wheelchair ramp?
Every single one of the skills you have outlined here are also required for another even more common activity... driving! If you can't move one object and recognize that it moves another object in proportion, you have brain damage and need special care. If you can't hold a mouse steady, or can't see the mouse cursor, you are handicapped and need special care. If you can't tell the difference between left and right, you are handicapped and need special care. If you can't understand a simple concept like opening a program to do something, even if you only see the word "program" as a synonym for the word "action", you are mentally retarded. Don't get on the road and endanger my life, and don't get on my computer and endanger my productivity.
The interface you propose has almost the exact same problems as the one you want to replace. If you can't hold a mouse steady, what's to stop you from pressing the wrong place on the touchscreen? Perhaps you meant touchhugefuckingwall. How are you going to tell the computer to perform different actions without having some way of activating it? You want to take away icons? What are we supposed to replace them with? Words? We already have that, it's called a menu. Should we speak at it? Ooh, but then I have to remember that blasted word "e-mail". Maybe we should just think real hard at them and hope something happens.
Special people need special support, and sometimes, they don't get to do what they want to do. A man with no legs is never going to win the gold medal in the 400-meter dash. There is no one magical paradigm that works for everyone and trying to achieve that is just going to screw everyone over... just look at Windows. It tries to be everything to everyone, and in the end it's just a mediocre tool for me and a confusing mess for the non-techie.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Or perhaps I know something you don't...
The thing is, there isn't a thing that can't be done, *now*, in free software. Most people use their computers as very expensive, error prone typewriters-cum-calculators. On the contrary, in the corporation X Terminals can do everything PCs can, at lower cost, better security, less failures.
Now if you are talking computers at home, it still holds. Even the proprietary software companies could have systems almost as capable as today's, but with far less security and reliability problems. Just that they got a severe case of Featuritis and wasted years of POSIX work by creating their own, proprietary APIs and stuff.
The rest of you reply is so misinformed as to be useless, not meriting even refutation. But here it goes: GNU/Hurd is an experiment that lost its urgency when BSD and GNU/Linux got released as free software. Apache is not unuseable, it is just that some modules outside of the core are still being tested. Gnome 1.4 is bad, but 2 is not related to Red Hat's nullified version. It is the result of hard work by Red Hat, plus Sun, plus Ximian, plus the community.
Because they were not educated in freedom. Neither in freedom nor in costs, security and reliability.
And that would be just lack of familiarity. Just how the transition from Mac OS 9 to X ruffled quite a few feathers, and from MS-DOS to MS-W16 and from MS-W13 to MS-W32, and from there to MS-WNT.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
You are so correct: what you name something has a profound effect on usability.
One of the stupidest things I've ever seen in GNOME is what they named the documentation program. They named it ScrollKeeper, since in a way, documentation could be thought of as scrolls, an ancient type of media whose main users today are Dungeons and Dragons players and rabbis. A cutesy little name with geek connotations.
Unfortunately, when most users hear the word "Scroll" they associate it most often with movement in a window. Guess what happens in ScrollKeeper breaks? They user sees "ScrollKeeper Error" and unless they're a GNOME programmer they think "Holy sh*t, there's something wrong with my windows" and not "Holy sh*t, there's something wrong with my documentation system".
Would the GNOME project ever change the name "ScrollKeeper" to something like "Gnome Documentation System"? Most likely not. They love their little cute names.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!