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

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.

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

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: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.