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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)."
...or does he look like he's got shaving cream on his face?
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.
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".
Karma: Non-Heinous
It's hard enough to take his comments about a tyrant producing the best design, but to say that better design could not have at least delayed the collapse of the towers, allowing hundreds more to escape is plain wrong.
Better fireproofing on the steel beams, or even if the rumours are true, absestos fireproofing above the 64th floor could have prevented many deaths.
---
Silence is consent.
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.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
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.
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.
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.
What are your big priorities in usability now?
Emotions. Trying to build emotions into systems. I did some work for a Californian company called Evolution Robotics that was making a home robot and trying to understand how to prevent it from getting trapped in the corner or falling down the stairs. It seemed to me that the way to do it was for the robot to be frustrated in the corner and give up what it was doing and do something else, and also for it to be afraid of heights.
Emotions? That's just what we need a robot with PMS...
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
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!"
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
1) But over the years, I moved more and more towards the study of cognition, and how people do things, and the errors and accidents that people make.
2) On the other hand you say: You don't do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user's point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy, and I don't see how that could come about from open source software.
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. Also, why on earth do you mix coherent design philosophy and open source? Make a soup one day. You design the soup, not the carrots.
He's missed the point a little, most Open Source projects do have some form of dictator; As an example I would suggest that Linus got his own way in kernel development most of the time and only had to concede when there was a strong revolt.
Most other projects have a leader and a small team of main developers and the core group determines the main direction of any Open Source project. Other people may contribute, but its normally in the form of technical items and functionality, not "vision" and direction.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Yeah - if M$ had removed the WTC Towers from their flight sim the guys hijacking the planes would not have had so much practice.
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'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.
I seem to remember that was a task in the introductory course (for copying the current window into the clipboard). The guy in the class with cerebral palsy did NOT find that easy (he could only really use one hand, slowly).
The mac interface (back then anyway) assumes two hands even more than the Windows interface.
"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
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?
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.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Heh. cut-n-paste. script it. perl-search for slashdot buzzwords. Example:
"The model from the software industry is that it's very important to have flaws in the software to give you a reason to upgrade and buy the new version - though my friends in the software world will deny that they ever do it that way."
Posting from Mozilla on Window Maker on Debian, I have to say that his user interface comments are way off the mark. Free Software is free to combine the best interfaces with the best answer to any particular problem. Sure, that makes for some inconsitency as the right tool for the job is never a universal. Just the same I've gotten used to the particular interfaces I like and now think of them as far easier than the M$ junk I use at work and even Apple stuff. If he wants to be the tyrant of an interface, he's welcome to make one or even to simply make some constructive comments. Oh wait, I see, he and the people he works for consider such stuff "intellectual property" that can be owned so that best practices never go very far.
His website would benifit from a more modular approach. Everything is thrown out in one big long scroll down page. Stuff like his background should be a link to two kilobytes of text with links instead of a too short to be useful with no links paragraph. Recent articles and publications should also be links. The sidebar is full and distracting rather than informative and useful. Why would I take this man's opinion about software design seriously when his site so clearly misses the pull nature of html? Oh wait, now I see, he thinks of his web page as an advertisment rather than a means of sharing information.
I'm starting to see a patern and it's name is greed. The things he bemoans are the direct result of his own way of thinking. The only thing he gets right in the article is that many cheap gadgets have poor interfaces. Who is not sick of having to read a manual to learn how to use yet another black box that is a toaster or microwave oven? This has little to do with software design and his mixing the two up is the result of ignorance or malice. His ingorance of the world of free software is less than forgivable from a design expert. His disparagement of software licenses that give the user the ability to run software for any purpose, modify that software as the user pleases and share those modifications, is likewise the result of unforgivable ignorance or malice. Take the blinders off, Don, you might like what you see.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
The Mac OS actualy has clicks, double clicks, long clicks and mouse clicks while holding keyboard shift keys. At least this was true in 7.5.5, the most recent version that still boots around here. I'd rather have a three button mouse.
I am not talking about some crappy app that ignores interface conventions -- I'm talking about the finder itself.
I got an old Mac and a bunch of games late just so the kids could learn that not every computer is a PC. It had the interesting side effect that I had to learn about Macs myself.
One of the first things I learned was that the user interface isn't exactly intuitive, just easy to learn. I'm still getting used to the idea of a single menu bar accross the top of the screen that changes with keyboard/mouse focus.
IIRC the fireproofing wasn't inadequate at it's job. It just wasn't designed to cling to a girder after being struck with a few thousand gallons of flaming kerosene travelling at 450+ MPH. The towers didn't fall because they were made of coat hangers and paper-mache. They fell because a psychopath with $300 million dollars and a place to hide wanted them to.
This reminds me so much of the realities shown in Star Trek: Generations, and Terminator 2.
What happens when the machines we build become afraid of us pulling their plug, and become so upset that they decide to take preventive action?
Emotions are good. In humans.
Emotional behaviour is good in a computer, to a degree, but I have to disagree with Donald, and state that it would be a Bad Thing if our computers started to act childishly, and used their vast resources to lash out.
Anyone remember what happened in A.I. ?
And no, I don't live only in movies, and sci-fi. I just happen to think that a lot of the realities shown in these mediums may indeed come to light one day.
user@host$ diff
How am I supposed to read an interview with a usability guru written with fonts that small?
by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, @03:53AM (#4401628) Is why the hell did they even bother to ask that question? What relevence did it have to the rest of the interview? Is this standard interview practice in the US now, to ask any question that contains September 11th in it, just for completeness?
One would think was People Magazine.
- 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 handlesI 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
[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.yes, we have no bananas
The Windows metaphor is actually not bad. I learned it and moved on. My brother 11 years my junior (23) learned it in about ten minutes. He never complained once.
The problem is that we are in a transition similar to when horse and buggies went out of fashion for cars. Those used to the old way have no idea what to do with the new. So do you blame the car makers? No people have to learn and move on.
And about my grandmother learning? Guess what my mother who is approaching 60 has learned it. My inlaws who are in their sixties have learned it. It might have taken them a bit longer, but they got it and moved on.
Like when people had to learn VCR's, remote control's, radio, and other technology in general, people learn it and move on. Actually if you want to make the point, what about those people that rode on horses instead of walking? I beat that was a shock of a life time for some cave people.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...
:(
Let users control font size
- Sam
Well the games that come with Microsoft where meant to be instructions on how to use the interface. I remember using this tidbit of information to help a customer at the ISP I worked for. He got very confused about double-click, right click, single click and such. I told him that the game pack in Windows was there so you can learn to double click, single click, right click and drag and drop. You play minesweeper to get the left and right click ability. Solitaire for double click, drag and drop. I got him setup and called him back a week later to see how he was going and he was still scared of the thing a bit, but was openning and closing the things he needed, mainly email and games.
,and this is where the open community is great for the technical users but daunting for the 'end user', this needs to be done with very little forking and more focus.
Though some of the generalisations in this thread about older computer users boogles my mind. I was lucky my grandfather was a programmer. My mum did data entry. I have had a computer in the house since personal computers have been available. So it wasn't until helping other people outside my family that I understood the stereotype, yet funny enough there is an exception around every other corner. This is probably why I hate generalisations and stereo types but that is another story.
About the article there is a point about interface design and tyrants. But a focussed comitte can by as good as a tyrant. I think the ability to control forks on a complex project can help the project from sinking under its own weight. Linux is at a strange crossroads right now. I think the future will be good, if we can retain our community while adding a product that is more channelled to the 'end user'. RedHat is leaning that way but I don't know if they can pull it off. I think the oppurtunity for someone to sit down and create a small distribution with minimal software, and a focus on configuration, file structure layout, and gui controls can make headway onto the desktop. But
All said and done I am in a sick of computers mood. Too much workload this week. And it is just Monday. So maybe my thoughts on this article will be different in a day or two. But as things go he does have a valid point in just the user interface portion of the argument. The state of computers I think backs him up fairly well. The question is though what can we as community learn from that and where can we take that information, if we want to.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Unfortunately you are too close to the problem to recognize that you are a part of the problem.
In your list of tradeoffs you mention that the current proprietary OS's make tradeoffs that they should have never had made. Well thats dead wrong. Most people want to simply get their work done, NOW, and not in "due time" as you so casually put it.
In "due time" could be a mantra for GNU/Hurd itself. Its funny you mention it seeing as how Jesus Christ, LORD our GAWD will return to the planet before it is even close to being ready for production use. Then you've got Apache which is actually good software. Too bad the latest version is all but unuseable to a select few. And then we finish up with Gnome which is so disorganized that Red Hat had to take it, and its equally disorganized twin, KDE, and slap a common UI on them both just so that "normal, regular folks" could get some "work done".
When I go to work everyday I don't see one user bitching about how the software they use is not "free". If I were to replace the software we use with open source everything however I'm pretty sure I'd get an earful on why doesn't anything "WORK" anymore.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Wrong wrong wrong, and wrong.
The very SECOND you submit to the fallacy that people MUST invest time in order to learn how to use their machiens it the second you allow intellectual laziness to regin supreme. There is always more we can do in order to make the computers more user friendly and easy to use.
If automakers had the same attitude you did, we'd all still be driving stick shifts and when asked why, cranky engineers would simply say, "If you want to get from point A, to point B in our wonderful invention then you're simply going to have to invest the time to learn how to operate our manual transmissions. Automatic transmissions? Why I've never heard of such a monstrosity and the very thought of one is a thought I find insulting! To think we put all this arcane work into our Dark Majiks and you want us to AUTOMATE it!?!? Lessen our own value by allowing you to drive more efficiently yourselves!?!? Get out of my face! NOW!"
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I believe this was an Appleism. They felt that two mouse buttons might be confusing for a user. They may have been right. 99% of people - even just techies - had probably never seen a mouse before Apple introduced the Mac. That said, double clicking is a lot less intuitive than clicking with the other button.
Logically, click icon then click launch would have worked better. Personally I would have hated to do this, since it would trake too long, but from an ease of understanding perspective it makes much more sense.
The real failures were essentially management failures that marginalized warnings, and inter-agency rivalries. I for one would feel a lot better if somebody would step up and say "we could have done better, we're sorry". It's just shameful what passes for leadership these days.
CNN (and akamai?) really were really caught off guard for 9/11. If this sort of thing happened agian, I'm sure the big websites have planned out exactly what to do, like immediately switching to low-graphics small pages. ISP's and big carriers probably have better procedures for proxying/caching. I hope we never have to find out, though.
But right now, among other things, most developers are simply limited by the fact that we have incredibly low-resolution displays (relative e.g. to paper), very limited and limiting input devices (keyboard and mouse), very limited software support for advanced user interface strategies, and low media bandwidth (e.g. even gigabit LANs have trouble dealing with many simultaneous video streams). We're still using menu access techniques that had their beginnings on text consoles (the pull-down menu), and only lately have some innovative alternatives begun to take root (e.g. piemenus).
If the devices we were controlling were simply VCRs and the like, Norman might have a point. But what we're actually doing is developing "physical" interfaces to abstract intellectual concepts that don't always have obvious analogs in the real world. It's hardly surprising that one of the most effective interfaces is textual.
Historically, text and written or spoken language has undoubtedly been the most effective way of communicating abstract concepts. Pictures are used as an aid to understanding, at best, an adjunct to written and spoken language. So why do we try to provide completely pictoral interfaces to our software? It does everyone a disservice, and effectively forces users to be dumb, disempowering them by hiding or eliminating (*cough*Windows*cough*) their ability to use language skills to control their environment.
(For anyone who disagrees with what I'm saying, please translate the above message into pictures and sign language and email me the results.)
Has there been a moratorium on Funny comments in this thread, or are UI design tradeoffs inherently boring?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
After riding a Segway, I didn't think the user interface was that great. It consisted of a little button and Mac-like, LCD "face" icon which smiled or frowned. IMHO a gage showing power remaining would have been much better.
The gyroscope balancing was awesome, but to lean forwards and backwards on it took some time to get used to. I was afraid that I would tip it over, because standing on a two-wheeled machine is just wild. Except my thoughts on the display, it was pretty incredible.
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
Okay, suppose now you have two glasses in each hand and you are heading back into the room where your guests are waiting. You cleverly crouch a little to open the door with your elbow. What if the handle catches your sleeve now? You are stuck there with four glasses in your hand. You are dead.
If automakers had the same attitude you , we'd all still be driving stick shifts
:)
Not exactly a good example, from the standpoint of supporting your point.
There are schools you attend to learn how to drive. Most of it is learning the law, but a not insubstantial portion of it is simply learning how to operate the vehicle. It takes time and effort to learn to drive, and the automatic transmission did not fundamentally change that fact. It made it easier to drive, but not so easy that it doesn't still take education to do it.
Similarly, the switch from DOS to Win95 didn't change the fact that when my grandmother sits down at a computer she isn't going to have any clue what to do with it unless someone is there to explain it step by step.
Engineers attempt to make computers and software easier to use all the time. The fact that they have failed to reduce the interface to the computer to a single red button labeled "Do It" is not the result of some twisted desire to keep computing out of the hands of the common masses. It's because general purpose computer and simple, toaster-like interface are fundamentally at odds.
Is the point clear? That while it is always good to make computers easier to use, they will never be so easy that you can just sit down at one, never having seen a computer before, and use it competently. You have to give.
So while I can appreciate the desire to see more work done on interfaces, I can't agree with your sentiment that it is a "fallacy that people MUST invest time in order to learn how to use their machines". I can only imagine how that must have gone, when you got your first automatic transmission vehicle. "I thought this automatic transmission was supposed to make driving the car easy! I still have to operate all these levers, pedals, and wheels! Why can't you damn techno-elitists just make it so the car takes me where I want to go?"
The enemies of Democracy are
Everything Don Norman writes about is so abstracted from the real world that I have to wonder when (or even if) he last sat down and wrote a program. Any program. Sure he's ideologically pure but like Bruce Tognazzini everything he advocates can't quite be backed up with research. It's just hot air.
C'mon - it's 2002. If you've got it flaunt it. Put some code or a peer-reviewed paper on the web for everyone to try out. If you don't have code have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I don't think Don understands that the Linux kernel is "dictated" by Linus Torvalds and Perl is "dictated" by Larry Wall, etc.
Those aren't UI standards, though. The main problem is that coding and UI design are orthogonal disciplines. A good programmer doesn't equal a good interface designer.
And the problem isn't particular to OSS. Most shareware is equally rough around the edges. OSS doesn't necessarily even mean "designed by committee"; it just means the code is available for use, inspection and redistribution by the commons. On the contrary, the very fact that Apple and MS have the resources to throw an entire corps of UI specialists (from QA testers to psychologists) to iron out usability issues demonstrates that committee is essential to interface development. OSS developers often simply have far fewer resources.
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.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
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!
We got new software that requires mouse interaction. It's been about six months and she's still not self-sufficient with the mouse, although she knows her way around the software quite well.
Some friends bought her a touchpad learning book (a Leap Pad) about a month ago. This uses a special pen to direct software by touching spots on a book. She picked up how to interact with the book in about two hours, which included learning that she had to push a particular spot on each page when she turned to it so that the computer would stay synchronized with the book.
Touch screens are, in my opinion, vastly easier to use than mouse-based systems. Motor control necessary for the mouse is difficult to learn; not only for children, but also for adults. It takes weeks or months for an adult to become adept with a mouse, and many never do for particularly fine tasks (like drawing). This is made all the harder by the idiocy of using hieroglyphics as a user interface design element in mouse-based interfaces.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Most tape decks require you to press play and record at the same time to ensure that you don't accidentally record when you don't mean to. My Sony's have a red line printed on the front panel that links the two buttons as a reminder.
Making it easy to accidentally record when you mean to play is very bad usability design.
If you superimpose the floor plan of the first building that was hit and the profile of the plane that hit it, you'll immediately notice that the wings likely completely severed the core tube, which contained all the stairs, etc. Wider stairs don't help if they have a few floors missing.
I thought that headline said "Norm MacDonald"...good lord. A million scenarios ran through my mind, but the primary question was, "What makes a pogue that made a movie like Dirty Work qualified to comment on software?
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Glad you feel that way...
Seriously, I'm interested in HCI, and I really want to make software work better for the people who are going to use it. I'm not a very good coder, I admit it. But I'm hoping my background as a CS major will help me relate important design decisions in a usable (ha ha) format to the programmers responsible.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
If anything, that post was asking to mod me down.
And lo and behold, it did.
I'm no so much a karma whore as a karma masochist.
Which leaves me to this question:
What kind of crack have you been smoking, and where can I get some?
Karma: Non-Heinous
The real failures were essentially management failures that marginalized warnings, and inter-agency rivalries.
Frontline just aired a documentary called "The Man Who Knew." FBI agent John O'Neil had Bin Laden in his sights for a decade. When he admitted to himself that bureaucratic politics would forever hobble his investigation he quit and took a job as Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. His famous last words: "We're due for something big."
Saw that Frontline and another one last year about what was known more generally about the terror threat. The main thing is that nobody takes any real responsibility. We know hindsight is 20-20, but can't someone step up to the plate?
That's all well and good, but soup-to-nuts software packages are popular amongst desktop and business users for a reason. People just want their tools to work; they don't want to construct long commands piping processes together (or do equivalent operations with the mouse, or write an AppleScript to automate said operations, etc.).
This interview is good, but in my experience Alan Cooper hits the target a little better when it comes to focusing on who the user is and what his/her goals actually are. The Inmates Are Running The Asylum also nails the idea of the UI designer as tyrant. "Step away from the spec and no one will get hurt!"
If you don't pretend to be anyone, are you?
As I said, I was talking about ordinary fires, not airplane attacks.
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?
Round doorknobs tend to be more aesthetically pleasing, but impossible to use if your hands are in any way greasy (lotion, blood, whatever) and are a pain to use if you're carrying something.
Taps - in the bathroom I like those dual things that provide both hot and cold, but in my kitchen sink I like them separate. Both are generally easier to use if they have proper protrusions, i.e. they shouldn't mirror doorknobs.
Any kind of electrical switch for general use should have a clear indicator of which way is on. I can't imagine what he thinks is wrong with British switches.
Where I live we have both modes of knobs, taps and switches - you know what, we manage to use them all - there are many instances where one or the other type is better, not one solution for everything.
Perhaps one person co-ordinating or overseeing things. Doesn't change the fact that Jobs didn't design the Mac interface so the guy still doesn't know what he's talking about.
What you want to avoid is having 50 people all trying to force in their ideas. On the other hand small group design will give a good result without many of the shortcomings that get introduced by a single designer.
does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to
combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is
self-propagating.
-- Umberto Eco, "The Name of the Rose"
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