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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.
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.
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
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
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.
Well, I can tell you've never used a Mac. Double-clicking is required on the mac desktop, and the file manager. That is, until you change that setting. Of course, that same type of change can be made in Windows as well.
Besides that, the Mac equivalent of a right-click is just holding CTRL+Clicking, or clicking and holding the mouse button. Would you like to say that is somehow better than the way Windows does it?
And, that method didn't even start until Win 95. Win 3.1 would give you a menu if you just single-clicked on an icon... So I guess that means Microsoft had it right all along (according to you).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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 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
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.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
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.
- 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
I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...
:(
Let users control font size
- Sam
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.
Educated in freedom? Do I have to remind you what that sounds like? Leftist communist revolutionaries used to say the same exact things about the pampered and comfortable capitalist middle classes. Is this a cultural revolution we're talking about here or everyday computing usage?
I don't know how you can say that XTerms can do "everything" a PC can. Sure if you don't mind slow load times, less software availability and single points of failure. In my company could you find us a XTerm version of the real estate software that we run on client PC's individually? I don't think so.
There's a TON of things that can't be done NOW in free software. Sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "Not true, not true, not true" everytime this is mentioned helps no one, especially not you. VMWare does NOT work for everything and for the things that don't need VMWare they aren't equivalents.
It does not matter if most people " as very expensive, error prone typewriters-cum-calculators.". Those overgrown typewritters are, when running Windows, able to run all the software you could ever possibly need. Freedom? What good is freedom on Linux when you don't have the rest of the software you need? I run Linux at home on one of my machines but for my job in real estate it is absolutely useless. Now I know my industry isn't the only industry in the world but it is one. And it certainly refutes your statement that anything a PC can do, open source can do as well. Educated in freedom. Thats a good one. So what am I supposed to do after I put on my soldiers uniform, march my co-workers into "re-education camps", give them open source software and they STILL ask me why the stuff doesn't "WORK RIGHT NOW"? Should my response each time they ask be, "In due time, at least now you have freedom!"?
I guess I really should have known that you as a Debian user and or coder would approach this issue from a political point of view instead of a common sensical and practical usage one. I had thought you might have been able to rise above it however.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I'm curious - this is different to Windows in what way?
That was evilviper's point, after all. Windows supports double-click, or you can use the Open command on the file menu, or press Return. (Certainly back to Windows 95 - I just checked - thanks VMWare!)
Blaming MS for inventing double-clicking seems harsh at best. It smacks of "Apple invented all the good stuff and Microsoft stole it, except when it's bad, in which case Microsoft invented it, the bozos. Even if it appeared first on the Mac."
I think that's what was bugging evilviper.
Indeed, it was the difficulty and hidden nature of double clicks that led Microsoft to create the Start menu. They watched new users trying to use Program Manager to launch a word processor - the results were that new users don't think of double-clicking - nor they did think of using File-Open. So the Start menu was created, which listed all the programs installed, and allowed them to be started with a single click.
That's also why you get that "Click here to run programs" message bouncing onto the screen the first time you run Windows 95.
Tim
Disclaimer: I use Macs and PCs. Hell, I even used to use Acorn machines.
Citrix and its little sibling, MS-WTS, work with any application that can be run on a MS-WNT server.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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.
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.
"95% of all Slashdot
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!
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.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Old facts die hard, huh?
The rest is just more of the same. If just a fraction of what users spend on licensing was directed to create, say, free fonts, then we would have had them for a long time now. But you miss a point: fonts are not software. They can be created with free software, they can be distributed gratis together with free software, but they are, in the end, data. They do not infringe on freedom as much as proprietary software, or rather not at all, as long as the font format in itself remains public.
Now you are trolling. You know the Gimp can be programmed in Scheme, and that is as easy as it gets short of hiring programmers. Which is what should be done in the first place anyway.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin