It should be clear from my writing how I feel about software in 2005: it’s atrocious. So nothing infuriates me more than when an interviewer asks me to predict the future, pen in hand, eyes resplendent with visions of computers that do our laundry.
This happened just a couple days ago when a reporter asked me to close my eyes and imagine ten years from now. I closed my eyes and said unequivocally: “We’ll get to the future when we fix the present. Until then, I don’t want to think about it.” He seemed upset with my answer (maybe because the basis of his article was the future of technology) and kept trying to rephrase the question: What’s the next big thing? I continued to stonewall: the next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.
I’m not trying to be stubborn or difficult. I’m just disgusted by the status quo. I’m disgusted by what the average person has to deal with on a day-to-day basis, and I can’t imagine a more irresponsible way to spend my time than to sit around pontificating on how else we can widen the gap between the people who actually understand computers, and everybody else.
Here’s what I mean: put a digital picture and an instant message window side by side and ask Mom to share the picture. Even though the windows are approximately five pixels apart, sharing them is about as intuitive as a W2 form. It’s actually easier to share a picture sitting on a server in China than it is to share your own stuff. And you want me to gush about podcasting?
I expect more developers would be disgusted, too, if they interacted with Normal Human Beings using software on a regular basis. But the emergence of “usability” as a separate industry only insulates them. When I was at Netscape, we engineers would get reports from the user experience team that read like a chronicle of interplanetary travel: “The mantibulator did not conform to User D4’s expectations. User D4 said it always flippled when she wanted it to flapple, and vice-versa.” The reports would then offer a list of recommendations, such as: “Make the mantibulator flapple.”
The problem is that in the comfort of her own home, away from the duplicitous two-way mirrors of the usability lab, User D4—her friends call her Beth Miller, a florist with 2 kids from Ohio—doesn’t express her consternation as: “I’m disappointed that the mantibulator doesn’t flapple.” Instead, it sounds more like: “Why the hell doesn’t this stupid piece of shit work?”
But you never see lines like that in usability reports. And it’s the same story in product reviews, where you’ll find the tamer: “I found the mantibulator to be interesting, but lacking in its flapplability. Two stars.” Why is there this huge disconnect between how Beth really feels and what we, the ones who can make an impact, really say?
Dancing daintily around the issue only gives the software industry a free ride. Take a break from User D4 and spend some time with Beth. Taste her anger, her confusion, her exasperation. Then throw professionalism to the wind and give her a voice.
June 14th, 2005 at 1:37 am
Speaking of which, an author of an Austrian computer magazine was very disappointed that Firefox doesn’t sort the recent URLs by most-recently-used.
His words?
“Back to IE.”
I suppose that’s about as much a profanity as you can get in this field :)
June 14th, 2005 at 2:13 am
Couldn’t agree with you more Blake. I think any of us who can step outside of the “geekosphere” can see the problems and issues “normal” people have with software from day to day. These problems are enormous for them but are incredibly easy and automatic for those accustomed to technology. As you say the future will be about making software that is currently available, understandable for the masses.
June 14th, 2005 at 3:11 am
Agree as well. This needs to be sorted out. Then my parents will be able to call me about normal things again, rather than just ‘I can’t find the folder with my holiday photos in’, ‘outlook has disappered’ etc etc!
June 14th, 2005 at 3:20 am
“The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.”
Classic!
June 14th, 2005 at 3:28 am
Seems to me, MS’s started Longhorn campaign or something like that. Why? Stat’s numbers showing how many people really understand computers poped-up recently in media. I might be wrong but I suspect your post is reaction on these numbers, or is it? Well, usability is, IMO, definitelly the way computers will go in couple of next years.
June 14th, 2005 at 3:29 am
Do “people” really care about software?
You’d better believe they don’t, just like they don’t care about how their TV, Radio, washing machine or toaster works, all they care about is what they can do with it. Period.
Blake is right in my view.
I’d add that perhaps there is something significant happening in this decade that has not happened before, created by the “children of the screen” generation that do not say “wooh” or “wow” to every latest techno gimmick like those from 80’s and 90’s did with the mobile phone, fax machine, Internet and email.
Perhaps the “children of the screen” will teach the world to be less interested in technology for the sake of itself and be more concerned about how technology can serve society instead, and that my friends would surely be worth of being the “the next big thing”
-Ian Hayward
NB. Children of the screen is a concept taken from the book, “Tomorrow’s People” by Baroness Greenfield CBE (an wonderful lady, and great thinker who I have had the pleasure of being introduced to at a seminar lecture last year)
http://www.britishcouncil.org/science-testimonials-baroness-greenfield.htm
http://www.theidm.com/lecture/
June 14th, 2005 at 4:04 am
That made me think. (Not that I’m a coder, but the gist of your post is a very important one which you very seldom hear about in the software world.)
June 14th, 2005 at 4:28 am
You can shut the reporters up faster with a money quote, like such: “The next big thing is the last big thing; only this time, it works.”
They really just want good quotes to hang their stories off of.
June 14th, 2005 at 6:11 am
Yeah, this is so accurate it hurts. I regularly talk with family members and family friends about their computers, and it’s obvious that we have a long way to go before they become truly easy to use. Most developers have a warped sense of what computers are supposed to be, and what they are supposed to do. I personally believe the entire foundation of thought is fubar’ed, and it might be necessary to tear it down and start over completely before things get any better.
Sadly, the problem only seems to be getting worse, as the new design philosophies include principles like “pop up useless hint dialogs” and “intervene in everything the user does” as ways to “help” beginners. Sorry to bring up everyone’s favorite punching bag of a company, but is anyone else unconvinced that Windows XP is a step in the right direction?
June 14th, 2005 at 6:13 am
You’re 100% correct, Blake. The next big thing is probably here already, we just haven’t found out how to use it yet.
June 14th, 2005 at 6:36 am
@Sebastian: I used Netscape for four years and IE for five before making the leap to Firebird two years ago. In those five long, lonely years, I must’ve downloaded the Mozilla Suite three or four times, but couldn’t get my head around it and went back to what was comfortable. It’s a sad fact that no matter what we do to make Firefox easy to use, some people just aren’t going to want to leave their comfort zone.
@Blake: Your attitude and vision are exactly what the software industry needs. Please don’t ever change.
June 14th, 2005 at 7:33 am
I dont like your ’share the picture’ example.
When I have a picture open (using MS picture viewer) and an instant message conversation open (using MSN Messenger) all I have to do to share it is click on ’send files’ and find the file I want to send!
When I do this, I am shown my current directory, as well as some other likely locations for the file on the left. (My Documents, Desktop, etc.)
I don’t really think it can be any simpler.
However, just because I found a hole in one example doesn’t mean I’m right.
But in my opinion, we need something or someone explaining the basic concepts of the PC world to the user. Examples of what I’m talking about: That every ‘item’ on your computer is actually stored in a ‘file.’ That every ‘file’ is stored in a tree-like hierarchy of folders. That every ‘task’ the computer performs has its own ‘window’ that can have the same basic actions performed on it.
I’ll agree with you, that these are totally foreign concepts to the nex computer user, but I don’t think I’m too entrenched in the “geekosphere” in assuming that a user should learn these types of things before expecting to use their computer effectively.
Look at your car. It might have an automatic transmission, ABS and Traction Control… all things that make driving easier on the inexperienced user… but before driving a car, you still have to understand the concepts of the basic functions of the car, and how it works. I don’t have a complete understanding of why my car (its an automatic) has gears called ‘1′ ‘2′ and ‘O’… but I had better have a solid understanding of ‘D’ ‘P’ ‘R’ and possibly even ‘N’ if I want to get anywhere.
June 14th, 2005 at 7:34 am
I think we (the collective computer geek “we”) are trapped by our own success. You want to making sharing an image over IM easy? That’s not too hard, for some definition of “easy”. That definition tends to be “when the person things sharing an image is important enough to download my package.” Or learning a new metaphor, or using a different file browser, or whatever. Incremental solutions are *hard*. If the current IM infrastructure didn’t matter, then it would be easy. But it does matter, and it’s hard to change. It’s especially hard to change small things in ways that don’t just make things worse.
And that’s just IM. What about *files*? I think they are broken — from a UI perspective — in a much deeper way. But the success of computers and the systems and metaphors we’ve created means we can’t just go and change things around. We can’t improve things very quickly. And if we try, it’s a kind of hubris. When you focus only on improving that one UI experience, you can forget about the wider infrastructure that experience exists in. Sometimes that’s UI conventions, sometimes it’s much more boring things like installation or viruses.
What’s my conclusion? I’ve forgotten. Something about design being hard.
June 14th, 2005 at 8:13 am
“Big Mike,”
Your picture is being displayed off your camera, or it’s saved somewhere that the Kodak photo software put it, or …
The only way I know how to answer your question is to have you watch someone actually attempt to do it.
“I don’t really think it can be any simpler.” sounds like a challenge.
June 14th, 2005 at 9:58 am
I find this a bit of a false dichotomy.
The next-big thing is very often acknowledged to be fixing the little problems we have now. Google’s success is predicated on this kind of stuff : better ordering of search results, cleaner user-interface, more appropriate ads that users don’t avoid as visual noise, an email interface that keeps spam managable.
I think if you’d offered a vision of 5 small problems that you’d expect to be fixed in ten years : such as drag-and-drop compatibility between web-apps and the desktop, etc. that would have sounded quite visionary enough for the reporter.
On the other hand, we’ve all seen the useless uninspiring “robots will do the ironing”, “buy your pet-food online” type predictions / applications, which are also about solving little problems. The trick is to recognise *which* little problems are worthwhile to be solved now, and which aren’t.
And *that* is hard.
I’m getting kind of sick of this literature of complaint (from Donald Norman and Alan Cooper on) that somehow we technical people are culpable because we didn’t deliver mythically easy use. And somehow it’s because we inhuman geeks don’t understand normal folks.
The truth is, people have a lot of different requirements, what’s obvious and simple to person A isn’t obvious or simple to person B. Designing good interfaces is always going to be difficult, because the machinery is complex.
Better to celebrate (and try to understand) the good ideas rather than just continue flogging this horse.
June 14th, 2005 at 10:23 am
I fully agree with everything you have to say. It seems like our computers are still overly complex and are really not intuitive at all. Even things that seem like they should be simple aren’t.
Your example of the photo being sent through IM is mostly right on the money. One thing that would help in this instance is if OS developers really put an emphasis on the drag-and-drop metaphor. I know Apple has done the most with this, but even still it only scratches the surface on how intuitive and easy to use an OS is.
I made a video showing your photo to IM example, and how simple this is done if you just change your mentality to “dragging” things around to place or send them.
Video: http://dreamfan.com/im_photo.html
Of course what this video doesn’t show are the steps to import the video into iPhoto, or even knowing that you can drag a photo to a chat window in the first place. I agree, we have a long ways to go until most people can work efficiently with computers/technology.
June 14th, 2005 at 10:24 am
@bigmike:
Quote:
When I have a picture open (using MS picture viewer) and an instant message conversation open (using MSN Messenger) all I have to do to share it is click on ’send files’ and find the file I want to send!
When I do this, I am shown my current directory, as well as some other likely locations for the file on the left. (My Documents, Desktop, etc.)
I don’t really think it can be any simpler./quote
Tell me, does your mother or your grandmother even know what a directory is? Does she know what is means to ’send file’? Does she know what the desktop is (that would be the TV monitory thingy with all the little folder/pictures on it, mom).
I’ve been on the phone with my mom, who has been in tears, because she doesn’t know what a directory is or, even, what the heck the monitor is. Your problem is, like many programmers - or those who work in the IT field - is that you are way up here (places hand at head height), where those who know next to nothing about computers are here (places hand at just below the knee).
You need to kneel down a bit and look up to understand what they’re seeing and what they’re going through.
BTW, what is an ABS? Is that an anti-B something or other. I know I have one in my car, but I’ve no earthly idea what it is. This is a very good example.
The programmers need to come down to earth a bit, and stop living in their closed-off 3′x3′ cubicles.
Cheers to you, Blake, for keeping your view point from the user’s aspect. Bravo!
June 14th, 2005 at 10:28 am
You are right. PCs are way to hard to use. I trained a bunch of people who never used a computer before. I knew that the biggest hurdle will be using a mouse. Thus, I had them play solitare where they could learn how to double click and drag. Maybe the next big thing is a mouse replacement?
June 14th, 2005 at 11:18 am
Dijares:
ABS stands for Anti-lock Braking System. :)
You are right about about me being ‘up here’ and the average mom being ‘down here’.
However my entire point is that while the industry obviously has to move down, there has to be some cutoff point where we expect the user has a base amount of knowledge.
Your mom was in tears on the phone because she didn’t know what you meant when you said ‘directory’… was that because the concept of a directory was out of her grasp, or because it simply had not been explained (correctly) to her yet?
Obviously software needs to come down a bit. Okay, a lot. But teaching people the basics about computers is more important, IMO.
I fear that for the sake of ‘useability’ we will sacrifice making software customizable and efficient. Firefox is a great example of walking the fine line well.
But God help me if all software ends up as ‘idiot-proof’ as my HP scanner software. Idiot Proof? Yes. Put the picture in. Press a button. Picture scans to a directory in your ‘My Pictures’, acording to the date scanned. But Heaven forbid that I be able to scan all of my pictures into one directory, no matter when I scan them.
Stupid example? I don’t really know. I just can’t resist a chance to hate on HP.
June 14th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Like someone (I forgot) said: I could be a really great musician/pianist, if only the music world would stop this f*ing complicate notes system!
By that I don’t mean we shouldn’t try to make computers easier, that’s really needed, but there should and will always be some basics people just have to learn. To draw comparisons is always a bit tricky, but it’s like the necessity to learn the alphabet to actually beeing able to read/write and communicate. Everything has it’s own “alphabet”: cars, music, swimming, football, etc. You can’t start any of these things without learing the basics. Computers aren’t different at all, but unlike many other things are even very often needed in working life, so you better learn how to use them, or you may be treated like an illiterate in a not so distant future. Again: I’m absolutely with you Blake, but only up to a certain degree.
June 15th, 2005 at 8:04 am
Hiya, I work in IT and had the entire office laughing this morning from this post. What is a mantibulator though?
June 15th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
You nailed it…and it’s not likely the situation is going to get better.
By the way, is the Mantibulator a Microsoft product?
June 15th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
Intuitive is the wrong word. Nearly anybody can learn to drive a car, and they are not at all intuitive. The key words for good user interaction are obvious, simple and consistent.
The basic controls for automobiles come in essentially two configurations. They are consistent across both model and make. I would be impressed if someone with no knowledge of a car intuited the purpose of a steering wheel, but once demonstrated, its use is both simple and obvious.
June 15th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Max,
I think “intuitive” is just the right word. Many people have already learned how to drag and drop on the computer. Given two windows side by side and an urge to get content from one to the other, I expect many people would intuit drag and drop as the logical mechanism. Therefore drag and drop would be ‘intuitive’, and the existing alternative is not.
Blake
June 16th, 2005 at 12:12 am
“Intuitive” is one of those words with a strong connotation, but a fuzzy meaning; like “common sense”. We expect every civilized person to possess common sense and we laugh at the remark of someone not having common sense. This is because we think common sense comes naturally and once you reach a certain age, you automatically get it. But that’s not true. “Common sense” is learnt and built up over time from one’s experience with society and the environment and about the physical limitations or consistencies in that environment. “Intuition” suffers from a similar fate. We expect users to have intuition, but we never stop to think about where they learnt that intuition. Intuition, so far, is built up from years of using crappy software that mostly rely on using menus and buttons and little drag and drop. Drag and drop has been under-used for many years and only used in the micro-level (within applications and for homogeneous objects). Users still haven’t grasped the notion of macro-level drag and drop (across applications and for incongruent objects). I still wouldn’t expect a user to know that you can drag and drop a file onto a chat window. Most users I know “intuitively” look through the window menus first before trying to drag and drop objects.
June 16th, 2005 at 12:21 am
This seems like a silly debate in any case. The point is that getting things like pictures from one window to another is hard and it should be easy.
June 16th, 2005 at 3:36 am
Could it be that the current design of computer OSs is inherently not usable? Thus making them usable is a bit like trying to make a boat fly.
Add to this the fact that programmers possibly don’t have the tools at their disposal to make usable programs in the first place and usability becomes a nightmare.
For example I would say that the current state of forms on the web is a joke. Why is there no “date” widget?. Currently filling out a date field is different from site to site and no method is obvious to someone who’s never seen a website before.
But perhaps the most important thing missing from computer usability is standards enforceable by law. Coming back to the example of cars. If you build a car, the accelerator pedal must be on the right, the brake in the middle and clutch to the left. If a company decided to go against this standard the car would not pass road safety standards and would be banned. Why then, can any man and his dog write a program any which he wants, install it on your system, any which way he wants and provide an interface any which way he wants.
This may sound draconian, but for me the real problem with usability and computers is not purely that they difficult to use. Most people won’t mind learning how to use something (like accelerating a car), but they do mind having to learn 10 different ways of doing the same thing. The OS needs to be a far more controlled environment for most users.
Computers are now so important to everyday life that by making them so confusing we are excluding people from everyday tasks. This must be unlawful - just like not providing a ramp into a shop for wheelchair users is unlawful.
June 16th, 2005 at 10:33 am
>Here’s what I mean: put a digital picture and an instant message window side by side and ask Mom to share the picture.
It’s not hard. Just drag the icon/thumbnail for the picture from the file browser (Nautilus) to the IM app (GAIM), and it starts a file transfer.
June 16th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
People may not care how a TV works, but usualy someone in the family RTFM, sets it up and explains everyone else how to use it. I have yet to see a device you don’t have to learn (even if just once in your early childhood).
June 18th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
I admire the way you lay it out. Right on target.
It strikes me that we are geeking-out in the solution space, where it’s all just cool techiness, and not putting ourselves in the problem space with Beth and where what matters–and shit–happen.
I like your reality. If its broken, don’t make more and better broken. Fix it.
June 18th, 2005 at 6:56 pm
Not sure why the trackbacks are not working, but here is comment post:
http://asoftwareproductmanager.com/aSoftwareProductManager/?p=29
June 18th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
Greetings:
Blake, your comments are so on the money. If anything I am more of an average-user who did IT training.
Computers are too hard for the average person to use.
Not to slam anyone but “Big Mike” makes some points that are think are representative of the programer folks that Blake was referring to:
“I dont like your ’share the picture’ example.
When I have a picture open (using MS picture viewer) and an instant message conversation open (using MSN Messenger) all I have to do to share it is click on ’send files’ and find the file I want to send!
When I do this, I am shown my current directory, as well as some other likely locations for the file on the left. (My Documents, Desktop, etc.)
I don’t really think it can be any simpler.”
Mike, I have to disagree: it took two paragraphs for you to succinctly explain the process! The process should be far simpler (for example, one should be able to drag and drop the photo into an instant message or into the body of an e-mail message and be done with it).
Also, speaking to the need to train Users in how computers store files, directory structures, etc:
“Look at your car. It might have an automatic transmission, ABS and Traction Control… all things that make driving easier on the inexperienced user… but before driving a car, you still have to understand the concepts of the basic functions of the car, and how it works. I don’t have a complete understanding of why my car (its an automatic) has gears called ‘1? ‘2? and ‘O’… but I had better have a solid understanding of ‘D’ ‘P’ ‘R’ and possibly even ‘N’ if I want to get anywhere.”
Other than the rules of the road and having the technical savey to pass the road test, what I have to understand is:
- Put the key into the ignition, and turn it.
- Depending where I am, drive in reverse (to get out of the garage, for example) or forward.
- To continue forward, press the gas pedal. To stop, press the brake pedal.
As a former IT Trainer, the learning curve for autos is far less than for computers.
Sincerely,
Lawrence
Ithaca, NY
June 19th, 2005 at 12:29 am
On the issue of forms from Robin Massart’s comment, I have own story to tell: I once saw a web designer try to increase usability by removing the “submit” button on the forms on his website. The reasoning went that since the submit button was only invented to make up for the shortcomings of HTTP, it would be less complicated for the user if the submit button was removed, since users would no longer need to remember to press it. Instead, the form was quietly submitted using Javascript and XMLHTTPRequest whenever it was changed. Intuitively it sounds reasonable since it is always good to reduce user’s cognitive workload. But in this case it was clearly counter-productive, because over the years users have learnt that you have to press the submit button to submit a form. And when they couldn’t find the submit button, the became confused and stalled.
June 20th, 2005 at 9:39 am
Lawrence,
Perhaps my Car example wasn’t a good one, but that doesn’t change the fact that when you want to use something, you have to learn how to use it. No matter what it is. Certain objects operate on a base set of principles and standards. Don’t confuse the word ‘base’ with ‘basic’.
June 22nd, 2005 at 2:58 am
Big Mike,
Actually I think your car is a good example. You are right in saying that you must learn how to use a tool, before actually using it. But imagine having to re-learn (and possible un-learn your previous knowledge) how to drive a car every time you change cars.
June 22nd, 2005 at 7:55 am
Blake - have you tried MSN Messenger? You can just drop the file into the chat window
June 22nd, 2005 at 10:43 am
Primary responsibility for fixing this lies with us, the producers, but I’m constantly amazed at what reviewers and consumers allow us to get away with. Somehow this industry got a special pass to produce low-quality, hard-to-use, unreliable products and yet still be successful.
In general, I find tech product reviewers soft. They are too concerned with what the “new features” are and not with the core question of does this product actually work and provide real value for real people. I read review after review that gives high marks to products I know are buggy, hard to use, and provide little real value. Walt Mossberg might be an exception.
Consumers, on the other hand, have somehow become convinced that if they can’t figure a piece of software out or if anything goes wrong, it must be their fault. When I hear this I tell them, “It’s not your fault, it’s the product’s. Hold the producer accountable the same way you would any other business.” In any other industry, consumers would return these products and tell all of their friends to avoid them. But not here, somehow the tech industry got a special pass.
June 22nd, 2005 at 10:48 am
Sriram,
What “file” am I dragging when I have the Word document open? And I have to tell my friend, who’s on AIM, to switch to Messenger just so I can send him a file?
June 22nd, 2005 at 1:04 pm
You’ve touched a nerve, and inspired me to rant about the same thing.
Trackback: http://www.thelooneys.com/blogs/jason/archive/2005/06/22/651.aspx
June 22nd, 2005 at 1:40 pm
I think the car analogy is excellent. Anyone driving today sees the complete ineptitude of drivers as much as we in IT see the complete ineptitude of users.
Auto manufacturers could do plenty to stop users from getting into accidents by collision dtection systems, countries could put in advanced drivingt systems into roads that autos could detect and automatically follow so as to make the driving experience totally auto-pilot. The issue is a simple one - COST!
The same factors exist in the computer software world - Doing something that goes beyond the functional basics and norms - COST!!! Not enough people want to pay for the development of the extra feature (usability) and not enough people want to pay for the increased cost of the end product (a more expensive car).
We could all pretend to live in a Utopian world but for those who live in the real world, we have to make a living and pay bills and those things cost $, euros or whatever.
Usuability is a costly feature just as a collision detection system - both nice but how many people want to pay the extra…
June 22nd, 2005 at 2:17 pm
You can drag & drop with a Mac!
Most programmes in OSX, you just drag images between windows and they just move there and do what you’d expect them to. For example, with iTunes you can drag images from your Web browser into the ‘album art’ box, and it just works. Even with the Windows version!
Apple do try and enforce a code of good practice with UI design, which makes life so much easier. Keyboard shortcuts are the same everywhere, widgets are shared etc. Nintendo also had quite a fierce approach to ease of use, e.g. in every game, when you press the ’start’ button, it must pause. Games can’t be released if they don’t follow the Nintendo rules. It is possible y’see, but not so much with the ‘free market’ approach with Windows.
June 22nd, 2005 at 8:44 pm
My mom still has a hard time with her computer, and I keep trying to teach her, but she still does not get it. Todays software is not only hard for the mothers, dads, or grand parents to learn, some of them are afraid to use the computer, afraid experiment and learn from there mistakes, because when they make mistakes, it makes them even more scared and confused, so it’s almost impossible for them to learn.
It would be great if they could make software that a little easier that also uses drag and drop for almost everything, and easy to understand instructions to where you don’t have to click so many times to get something to work.
Instead of having double click on a file or program, why can’t it be just one click? My mom forgets sometimes that she has to double click, and sometimes when she does double click she does it too slow, and when nothing happens she thinks her computer has a virus, or it’s broke.
I can’t keep teaching my mom the same thing over and over because it’s making me crazy, and I don’t wants to go crazy, because somebody might send me to the crazy house where there’s crazy people, which is not a good thing, because I’m not crazy, just going crazy, but it’s not permanent.
June 23rd, 2005 at 2:07 am
Back to car analogy.
Yes, this requires some basic skills - how to start a car, operate AT, gas and brakes. You don’t care about internals of those things.
So proper analogy between picture sharing and car would be like this:
Pic: you want to share pic, so you drag it from one window and drop on IM window.
Car1: you want to drive, so you put AT selector from P to D and step on the gas.
Car2: now the same with Big Mike’s files: you pop-up AT box open, find the right pair of gears, make them work togather, and here you go. Easy, isn’t it?
So yes, files and directories and all that jazz is not easy. Consult Norman and Cooper fot this ;)
June 23rd, 2005 at 9:04 am
I agree with the laud and glamor of the 41 comments entries above with one proviso. It is awfully difficult to get to your techies when I would like some response. I have stopped using IE which is forced on its customers by AT&T worldnet quit a while ago, and after a lot of research now use Firefox. For quite some time I note that links to their Video News and Audio Clips do not work using Firefox as my browser. A message window states that I can get these items by using IE and that efforts are under way to correct this problem. IE uses Real Player and it works fine. Is anyone looking into this problem?
Don Klich
June 23rd, 2005 at 3:57 pm
DREAM ON.
We don’t have to fix the software. We have to fix the system. Users that are TRAINED don’t have trouble sharing photos via IM.
Users who are trained know how to read a help file, and don’t have trouble sharing photos over IM. Users who are trained know how to lookup “How to share photos in IM”, or how to leverage a peer support forum.
We can either attempt to boil the ocean and fix the thousands of crappy UIs foisted on the public every year (hint #1: it will never happen), or we can do the SIMPLE thing and start training users.
This begins with REAL MANUALS that users can read. How many software products today include real manuals? Hint #2: None. You can’t RTFM if there isn’t a FM to read.
Once users learn the basics of grokking software, they become self-sufficient. If organizations redirected a fraction of the funds they waste on other crap annually on training, the higher productivity and lower help desks costs would more than return the investment.
And all the clueless Moms will be gone in a decade or so, so we won’t have them to worry about, anyway. The current generation won’t remember a time without computers, and don’t have any problem figuring out crappy UIs.
Sure, software should be easy to use. Some actually is. But most software human interfaces will remain poorly conceived, because great UI designers are born, not made.
You can teach anyone to play piano, but prodigys are born. So it is with GUI design. You can document the crap out of usability guides, and programmers ignore them.
It seems the only platform that programmers pay any attention to usability guidelines is the Mac, and even there, ease of use is steadily slipping. Read the Mac UI guidelines sometime and you’ll see.
And usability guidelines on Windows and *NIX? Forget it. Nobody pays attention, including the OS’s creators.
TRAINING, training, training. That’s the answer. Teach users to fish, and they will feed themselves.
June 23rd, 2005 at 5:33 pm
You are preaching to the choir, and I love to sing along!
June 23rd, 2005 at 8:57 pm
Blake,
It seems to me you’re to hard on the industry. If you go back and look at the state of software in 1995, what we have today is truly miraculous. And what we have ten years hence will be that much better.
June 24th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
shel Israel: He’s hard on the industry because it needs it; much of the improvement in the last 10 years has been because of people like him (and in the case of Firefox, him specifically).
July 1st, 2005 at 4:38 pm
Title: The Unfinished Revolution: human-centered computers and what they can do for us
Author: Dertouzos, Michael L.
July 9th, 2005 at 2:32 am
We have come a long way, but not as cleanly as we should.
Every time my dad calls me and asks why he can’t back up his Word document and what “sharing violation” means, I’m reminded of this article.
July 17th, 2005 at 5:35 am
don’t ya get pissed with everybody agreeing with you? ’syncophants” I believe is the term. BTW whats a URI? Do u Blake Ross REALLY write these articles?
July 24th, 2005 at 10:53 am
As an average professional middle age man I have become the computer expert in my family, and not by choice. But the last time my skills were consistent with the tech choices was 1985 when I got my first computer, Macintosh. Since then I continue to fall farther behind the products available. Your article speaks to my frustrations, here are some thoughts:
*it is outrageous that this industry is allowed to market products with significant design errors. There is no real financial recourse or accountability.
*it is the arrogance of these companies to deny responsibilty when the hardware doesn’t work with the software(or vise versa). Lots of fingerpointing.
*it is irresponsible for the industry to put out products without testing the “side-effects.” For example maketing the interent without taking care of the problem of security (billions have been lost).
*it is ironic that an industry based on communication to work more efficiently was developed my a community of brilliant people who don’t know how to communicate clearly.
*nothing is accidental. The industry likes the set-up and they have contempt towards their customer(just try explain using AOL, its my parent’s Buick). The “tech geeks” have taken over and they are not letting go!
September 4th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
“You’ve touched a nerve, and inspired me to rant about the same thing.”
you are right.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:39 am
I would like some response. I have stopped using IE which is forced on its customers by AT&T worldnet quit a while ago, and after a lot of research now use Firefox. For quite some time I note that links to their Video News and Audio Clips do not work using Firefox as my browser. A message window states that I can get these items by using IE and that efforts are under way to correct this problem.
June 9th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
[…] In a recent lecture here in Sacramento on this very subject of software companies’ role in Internet security, Schneier repeatedly bashed software designers in general for their stupid and thoughtless design practices. He stated that, as the world’s most recognized security guru, he was ashamed that he could not offer his own mother a solution to surf the Internet safely. Just this month, Ross also wrote on the subject in his blog. He stated that, being someone who is regularly asked to comment on what he believe the future of computes holds, he foresees a bleak future for the computing industry in general if software designers don’t start getting serious about their design practices. “I’m disgusted by what the average person has to deal with on a day-to-day basis,” he states. […]
March 19th, 2008 at 3:46 am
I apologize for posting in quite an old post, but I quoted a post from here in my blog post (found via Wikiquote), so I began reading the article.
By your example about the picture and the IM window, Pidgin is actually one of the most user friendly IM clients. With Pidgin, I can simply drag the picture onto the window.
Of course, there are still some networks that don’t support this, but it’s all there on the client side of things.