Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

Donald Norman On Software And Other Things 299

Posted by timothy from the depends-whose-version-of-easy dept.
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)."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Donald Norman On Software And Other Things More

Donald Norman On Software And Other Things

Comments Filter:

  • Is it just me... (Score:3, Funny)

    by echophase ( 601838 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @04:25AM (#4401361)
    ...or does he look like he's got shaving cream on his face?

  • disparagingly? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by djradon ( 105400 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @04:28AM (#4401367) Homepage Journal
    I don't know if I'd call Don's assertion that UI design is best done by a "tyrant" disparaging. Maybe he's on to something that open-source needs to adopt?


    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.

    • Re:disparagingly? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Sunlighter ( 177996 )

      I don't think Don understands that the Linux kernel is "dictated" by Linus Torvalds and Perl is "dictated" by Larry Wall, etc.

      Yes, there is a threat of forking. But that's what keeps these "dictators" honest.

      • Yes, but Perl and the kernel aren't UI issues.

        Building the world's slickest transmission won't do the driver any good if you forget to show him how to find third gear.

        Folks who want to see Linux leave the server ghetto should take some of these observations to heart.
    • 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!"
      • >
        Isn't there a tyrant in every OSS project?

        No. Apache, GNU/Hurd, Gnome are just some examples of free software projects owned, developed and maintained by committees.

        The tyrant vs committee thing is just a thoughtless, misinformation propaganda sound bite. The real points are:

        Trade-offs. MS-W32 useability was traded-off against security and freedom, Mac OS X user-friendliness was traded off agains popularity and freedom. This are trade-offs that should never have been made. It would be better to have less popular and less friendly software, granted it was fundamentally sound. This would have allowed for building better user interfaces in due time.

        End-user focus. The Linux kernel, the Apache server, and many other projects simply have no business with the naïve end-user who wants a Graphical User Interface. This is a business for Gnome, GNUStep, KDE, Motif and the like of them.

  • 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".
    • Everything you mentioned took me about 10 minutes to accept and memorise, when I was about 10 years old.

      I don't think I was especially gifted .. just willing to learn. I think older people especially need to accept that *shock* they don't know everything, and there's still things worth learning!

      If everything's simple, easy to use and unchanging - where's the progress?
      • What people tend to forget is that we actually had to learn to read a dashboard on a car.

        For a fair comparison take yourself back to when horse and buggies were the transportation of the day. Do you REALLY think people knew what to make of a car, with its steering wheel, brakes and gas pedal? I THINK NOT! If I may quote Alan Cooper a GUI specialist, often the best user interface is not the friendliest, but the one that solves the task most efficiently. Case in point spreadsheet. Nobody ever asks again how to manipulate numbers on a spreadsheet. But yet a spreadsheet in its full form is rather complex. So why can we use a spreadsheet? Because we learned it!

        The real test, which was proven by your comment is that it took you ten minutes to learn when you were ten years old. And since it took ten minutes I see it like a dashboard that you learned and moved on.

    • Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kaiwen ( 123401 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:16AM (#4401460) Journal
      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

      • Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations (Score:4, Informative)

        by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:49AM (#4401521) Journal
        Apple got at least this much right -- give them one button, and don't make them push it more than once.


        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).
      • I used to train people in the use of Windows and Office. And you're right: sometimes someone comes along straight out of helpdesk mythology. The one who picks up the mouse and points it at the screen, that kind of thing.

        But trust me, thats one in a hundred, or less than that. And usually, it's because these people want extra attention, not innability to comprehend what's going on: it's called willfull ignorance.

      • "Why can't it just do what I want it to do?" (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "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
      • 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.
        • Guess what my mother who is approaching 60 has learned it.

          If we're going to toss out anecdotals, my mother, who has a Master's degree, is completely befuddled by computers, and is constantly forgetting when to double- and when to single-click. When I design interfaces, I design them with her in mind.

          But, then, anecdotals prove nothing.

          Lee Kaiwen
          Taiwan, ROC

      • Re:Hooray for Gross Generalizations (Score:4, Insightful)

        by aluminumcube ( 542280 ) <[moc.noisyle] [ta] [gerg]> on Monday October 07, 2002 @08:43AM (#4401916)
        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?

        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.

        • GNOME (notice it's an acronym): GNU Network Object Model Environment. It's a good name that describes its purpose; to be a complete network based computing environment. The reason it doesn't seem to conform to a name for a GUI is because GNOME is intended to be much more than merely a GUI.

          I haven't followed Evolution, but I suspect it's a reference to the next advancement of email systems. Just as Evolution, the natural process, tends to weed out the weakest species, this program is probably intended to make all other email systems obsolete (Natural Selection at work).

          Apache: This web server began life as a series of patches to the NCSA web server, thereby earning the reputation as "a patchy" server. Apache is a clever evolution (pun intended) of the term.

          Free software developers have historically had a knack for clever names which a lot of people don't research enough to understand. But that doesn't stop them from bitching, obviously.

          I fail to see how clever naming which escapes your grasp (even assuming that the names were bad) has any relevance to the fanciful notion that OSS developers have a "general lock of concern for making useable software." If you want to be a snob, that's you're business. But don't disparage the people who are gracious enough to provide you will free and Free software, much of which comes from great personal effort.

          If you think that the effort to learn how to use a tool is too great, you have several options:

          1) Suggest to the author how it can be better. Free software authors always welcome useful feedback, and may use your suggestion(s). Pay the author for his time, and I'm sure you'll get a great response. If you're just in it because you don't want to pay for software, then stop whining.

          2) Pay someone to make your changes. Free software gives you complete freedom to do this. If you're just in it because you don't want to pay for software, then stop whining.

          3) Buy a commercial alternative that perfectly meets your requirement for a simple name. Does it work? Great! If you're just in it because you don't want to pay for software, then stop whining.

          4) Learn to program and make the changes yourself. Not worth your time? Review the above options.

          You brought to mind an odd scenerio that plays out like this (you're "Whiner" by the way):

          Whiner: I'm sooo hungry. Somebody please feed me. I have such a craving for a little meat.

          Good Samaritan: Here's some steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, and an extra bottle of cola. My neighbors and I have spent the last several years building a self-sufficient food-production system. We've had to work hard to find alternatives to common production methods and certain many common ingredients in order to avoid legal problems, so this isn't perfect, but it is very healthy and rather tasty. You're welcome to take all you can carry. We'll even show you how you can make your own self-sufficient food production system so you'll never go hungry again.

          Whiner (punching good samaritan repeatedly): You bitch! I want a little meat, and I want it now! I didn't ask for side items, and I certainly don't want to know how to be self-sufficient! Just give me what I want, when I want it, and shut your trap!

        • ScrollKeeper (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Ilan Volow ( 539597 )
          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.

      • Let me guess, you wipe people's asses for a living, right?

        None of the objections you had were even close to the level of skill and ability it takes to be a productive member of society. These issues absolutely should NOT be addressed in the baseline computer system, and if you wonder why, ask yourself, is every staircase in your house replaced by a wheelchair ramp?

        Every single one of the skills you have outlined here are also required for another even more common activity... driving! If you can't move one object and recognize that it moves another object in proportion, you have brain damage and need special care. If you can't hold a mouse steady, or can't see the mouse cursor, you are handicapped and need special care. If you can't tell the difference between left and right, you are handicapped and need special care. If you can't understand a simple concept like opening a program to do something, even if you only see the word "program" as a synonym for the word "action", you are mentally retarded. Don't get on the road and endanger my life, and don't get on my computer and endanger my productivity.

        The interface you propose has almost the exact same problems as the one you want to replace. If you can't hold a mouse steady, what's to stop you from pressing the wrong place on the touchscreen? Perhaps you meant touchhugefuckingwall. How are you going to tell the computer to perform different actions without having some way of activating it? You want to take away icons? What are we supposed to replace them with? Words? We already have that, it's called a menu. Should we speak at it? Ooh, but then I have to remember that blasted word "e-mail". Maybe we should just think real hard at them and hope something happens.

        Special people need special support, and sometimes, they don't get to do what they want to do. A man with no legs is never going to win the gold medal in the 400-meter dash. There is no one magical paradigm that works for everyone and trying to achieve that is just going to screw everyone over... just look at Windows. It tries to be everything to everyone, and in the end it's just a mediocre tool for me and a confusing mess for the non-techie.

        • Remind me to avoid hiring or working with you.

          An intuitive interface is one that, ideally, requires no training, no learning, no manuals. Your equation of failure to intuit unintuitive and poorly designed tools with mental defects is just one more indication that many in the tech community are contemptuous of users. Computers are tools for everyone, not just toys for techies.

        • If you can't move one object and recognize that it moves another object in proportion, you have brain damage and need special care.

          Ah, yes, the classic blame-the-user rationale: "If he can't figure out my interface, then he's a damn moron."

          If you can't hold a mouse steady, what's to stop you from pressing the wrong place on the touchscreen?

          The primary problem touchscreens overcome is not an unsteady hand, but the difficulty of correlating the movements of an input device to an onscreen cursor. I don't know anyone -- even the most severely mentally handicapped -- who doesn't understand the concept of touch; sight and touch are the most fundamental interface mechanisms we have. Similarly, my touchscreen training sessions generally last about 4 seconds: "If you want it, touch it." Beats mouse training hands down (no pun intended!). The most usable and intuitive information kiosks I've seen -- in department stores, supplying directory information, etc. -- always use a touchscreen interface combined with a simple menu system -- no more than five items is ideal. Surprisingly, the use of icons vs. words doesn't seem to be of major importance for usability; using both together seems to achieve the best results.

          Lee Kaiwen
          Taiwan, ROC

      • Good post. My experience mirrors yours.

        For someone who has never seem a computer, a GUI is no more intuitive than the inside of a car is to someone who has never seen a car. (Think about it: If you'd never seen a car, would you even know how to start it?)

      • If you click it twice real fast, it's called (You still with me?) "Double Clicking".

        Yeah, let the original commentor try double-clicking with a pen-and-tablet.

        Got that? Still with me? Now try right-click-dragging (to create shortcuts in windows). How accurate were you? Did you manage to select the left-click menu that follows, or did your finger slip off the button whilst dragging?

        Double Clicking opens up this program. This program is called [foo]. It does [bar].

        Now try double-clicking. Try it in an application like WS_FTP, where double-clicking the wrong thing can delete a page off your website. Notice how when you click on one thing, then right-click for a menu, that counts as a double-click?

        Try it in a different application. How about visual basic? Click to select a control, drag to move it. Oops, looks like you did that too fast: it got counted as a double-click, and now you've opened a code-editing window.

        ( Don't forget you can set windows to operate in single-click mode. (View::Folder options::web-style). But your common dialog boxes will still be double-click )

        And suddenly my grandmother can check her e-mail.

        Honestly? If someone has trouble using a mouse, you could do worse than giving them Pine as an email program, and Links as a browser. Unplug your mouse someday, and try using your standard programs.

      • Well, I agree with your criticisms of the poster's tone, but I have to say that everything he or she described was mastered by all 4 of children shortly before or shortly after reaching the age of 2.

        Some things are quite intuitive for people who are open to learning. Another benefit is that a two-year-old os not afraid to break something.

        However, I must say that many of the gains in usability that Microsoft has made over the years is being casually tossed aside in the pursuit of style or look (which itself is horrible). The end effect is software is getting uglier and harder to use.

        The other usability problem I've noticed is using cordless phones. Someone handed me a cordless phone the other day and the array of buttons was absurd. The reason phones were so easy to use is that they were all the same... that too is disappearing while companies are scrambling to cram all kinds of gimmicks of marginal (or less) usefulness.

        We've reached a point where every product tries to do everything poorly and almost nothing does one thing well.

      • 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.

        Apple invented (or perhaps stole from Xerox):
        The single click - to position the caret.
        The double click - to select a word.
        The triple click - to select a paragraph.

        If you think double clicking's bad, then triple clicking must be demonic, right?
      • Double clicking goes back to at least Apple. It was in the original Mac in 1984.

    • learn to think (Score:3, Interesting)

      by autopr0n ( 534291 )
      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.

      • Re:learn to think (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, 2002 @06:49AM (#4401618)
        I think that although the GUI was a brilliant invention back when the problem was "How do we create a computer that can be used and understood by people?"; the GUI took a common situation (The workplace) and put it on a computer. Look, instant metaphor!

        The problem we have now, though, is that the metaphor has become the reality, and it isn't a metaphor any more. Keep documents in a filling cabinet? Thats like saving a file to the network drive. People don't think in terms of the metaphor any more, they think in terms of the computer.

        So theres the problem (As I see it). Computer designers no longer have a metaphor to base their designs on. Its self referential (Where do you place a file if you want to keep it? Uh, on the file server. Darn!).

        What we need now is a way to go beyond metaphors. Yeah, should be easy....

  • Hall of Shame (Score:5, Interesting)

    by e8johan ( 605347 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @04:34AM (#4401376) Homepage Journal
    This site is a great laugh when discussing usability: http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm [iarchitect.com]. I can't help noticing that Micro$oft has quite alot of entries...
    • The hall of shame is a hoot, but I've never had very much respect for the hall of shame folks. Their site is a good place to go if you want to wallow in your superiority to the poor shmoes who design UI's for a living, but not a place to go if you want to learn about good design.

      Take for example, their description of one feature in Lotus Notes (a product which I agree has a terrible UI). When you log into Notes, the password dialog box displays a random number of "X"'s for each key you press. It gives the user feedback that he has pressed a key, but not on the number of of keys he has pressed. Thus, it effectively hides the number of characters in your password.

      Their response:

      Who cares. This is not the login window for a weapons targeting system; it is an e-mail application. We wish the designers had spent their time improving the usability of the application itself rather than wasting it on useless diversions.

      This completely ignores the fact that there are many users who require a high level of security in their e-mail: military and intelligence officials, high level corporate officers, and people who just don't want people poking around in their e-mail or impersonating them. It's a very foolish stance to take that e-mail security is just not that important to anyone.

      This breaks what in my view is a cardinal rule of UI design: never assume the user is like you.

      My problem with the site is that if your exposure to the problem of UI design were limited to reading it, you'd think that designing UIs was just a matter of avoiding certain mistakes. Perhaps of cultivating a refined sense of what things work in a UI versus what things do not.

      This is a self-centered view, not a user-centered view.

      How do major products make it into production with horrible user interfaces? Because there was no user testing early enough in the design process. User testing will not eliminate user interface flaws, but it will tell you whether users can get work done easily or not, which is the only metric which matters in the end.

      In the end, holding up designers for "shame" is an exercise in narcissism. What does need to be held up and promoted are better processes for designing software, that keep designers close to users and make measurable improvements to the usability of software.


      • This completely ignores the fact that there are many users who require a high level of security in their e-mail: military and intelligence officials,...
        ----
        Intelligence officials can't even _look_ at secure email except in very secure settings on very secure networks in very secure facilities, where everyone in the facility is more or less authorized to see the email contents. Well, sort of. Not really gainsaining what you said, mind you. Just picking a minor nit...

        C//
    • This site is a great laugh when discussing usability: http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm [iarchitect.com]. I can't help noticing that Micro$oft has quite alot of entries...

      As does Apple, actually.

      And if you look at the Hall of Fame (instead of just the hall of Shame) on that site, you'll also notice that they have quite a lot of entries in that section of the site too.

  • Donald Norman on open source... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jouni ( 178730 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @04:44AM (#4401404)
    Snipped from the interview: "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."

    I believe he has a very strong point, even if voicing it could make him unpopular on SlashDot. I guess Don isn't too worried about his karma. ;-)

    I believe the world would benefit a great deal from a consistent, well-designed Linux user interface that was engineered for the common man. It's too bad companies like Eazel [eazel.com] are no longer around - is there any new kid on the block? Someone riding the waves of the Open Source ocean?

    For a company like that to succeed they would have to be A) commercial, B) focused and C) very well funded. They could start by targeting a niche or two, building interfaces for people who want a Linux based office machine or a graphics design workstation. If you want to create a consistent, strong design, you can't please everyone.

    Jouni

    • A simple solution... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by autopr0n ( 534291 )
      A simple solution would be to define the program input/output requirements in some standard language (say, XML with some schemas) And then have GUIs generated on the fly. Not only would you have a lot more consistency, you would gain a lot more flexibility and personalization capabilities.

      That way OS coders who arn't interested in GUI design don't have to worry about it, and those that are can just work on GUI generators :P

      • A simple solution would be to define the program input/output requirements in some standard language (say, XML with some schemas) And then have GUIs generated on the fly.

        XML is not a solution to everything, writing a really good intuative GUI that doesn't look like junk is an artform.

        Al.
    • I believe the world would benefit a great deal from a consistent, well-designed Linux user interface that was engineered for the common man. It's too bad companies like Eazel [eazel.com] are no longer around - is there any new kid on the block? Someone riding the waves of the Open Source ocean?

      Yeah, they're called Red Hat Linux [redhat.com]. Ever heard of them?
    • Doesn't Unix have a coherent design philosophy? And GNU is a reasonable reimplementation of Unix. Sure, there is a lot of other cruft slapped on top which isn't always consistent (for example, not every program has a manual page), but the basics form a consistent and usable interface.

  • From the article:

    >
    You don't do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator.

    This has nothing to do with free software. It has something to do with OpenSource only in that OSS biggest promoter, ESR, is the advocate of the "Bazaar"-style development. The fact is that many free software projects are lead by benevolent "enlightened dictators", and even some "committees" are now paying attention to usability and accessibility, such as Gnome.

    Moreover, some dictators do get us useability, but at the price of freedom and security. It is not a morally acceptable tradeoff.

    >
    The Internet has been successful, but it could have been designed better. What's successful is the interface - the graphical user interface really made a big difference. But we know it doesn't work on the cellphone. I believe that having information available on a cellphone will turn out to be more important than on the computer, but it will have to have a different format.

    No, what is successful is all the infrastructure that made the interface possible. He is thinking about the Web actually, and he mixes up it with HTML without CSS and with WML. The obvious solution to the cellphone interface problem is XHTML 1.1 and following, that allow modularisation and adaptive rendering of the interface according to the client's constraints. So it is not a different format; it is only going back to the original, fundamentally sound approach taken by committees and engineers in SGML, getting rid of all the junk thrown in by supposedly "user-friendly" designers and marketers people and "steering companies".

    • Re:Too bad he doesn't get technology and freedom (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:28AM (#4401482)
      Infrastructure is like garbage men. Most don't pay attention to them, except when there's a problem.
      So one shouldn't be surprised that a "usability" engineer would have a blind spot. They don't see us, we don't see them.
      • >
        Infrastructure is like garbage men. Most don't pay attention to them, except when there's a problem.

        You are dead right here. Nonetheless, this is an extremely sad situation.

        >
        So one shouldn't be surprised that a "usability" engineer would have a blind spot. They don't see us, we don't see them.

        Too true. Even so, if one wants to have free software at end users' desktop, or even to make the so-called 3G cell network wireless web take off, not to mention accessibility, this gap must be bridged. Gnome and KDE are trying to do this, XHTML and Mozilla too, but these aren't enough on the mainstream press' radar.

        Moderators, please +1 Insightful for the parent.

    • Um, no.

      Having contributed to the user testing of sending information in XHTML here at Nokia (I worte the test pages, viewed some of the tests, and read the guidelines), I can tell you that just taking your big pages and forms and marking them up solely with XHTML and then expecting them to "just work" anywhere is a bit of a simplification, to put it mildly. Reorganization is required.

      Especially when it comes to navigation to other pages embedded in the text. There is so little space on a cellphone to create a context of "where you are" that going forward and then back to your original text or scrolling up and down becomes very mind-consuming and thus frustrating. On a big screen, you have more visual cues.

      We found all kind of things to avoid on forms and pages, like cutting pages into too many small items if it is one long text, but putting elaborated items in a long list each on their own page with a list-overview link. The organization of the information was also crucial for usability, like what kinds of links at the beginning of the experience and what kinds at the end -- nothing that using XHTML/CSS enforces.

      No, what is successful is all the infrastructure that made the interface possible. He is thinking about the Web actually,

      Of course he should think about the web. Gopher, Usenet, irc, mail, Archie, Veronica, those all existed for years and years, and only very few people used it. It wasn't driving people to want the Internet.

      It was the front ends for the Web -- not HTTP itself, which is just another protocol, but the genius of making it look like interactive pages -- that made putting bizarre agglomerations of letters and symbols, starting with the idiotically unhuman "http://www" (I know what it means, but Jane On The Street didn't) on the sides of busses viable to the point businesses thought they needed to do that to stay profitable, and drove people to but computers and connections.

      TCP/IP didn't do that, it existed for decades. alt.sex.binaries didn't even do that. WWW did.

  • Well, at least I liked his book... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Deton8 ( 522248 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @04:54AM (#4401423)
    Can't say his interview was informative, but his book _The_Design_of_Everyday_Things_ seemed so profound to me that I bought an extra copy and gave it to my company's industrial designer and told him to take a day off and read it. I think some of it soaked in, and our most recent products seem far less user-hostile.
  • 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 [technologyreview.com] on the steel beams, or even if the rumours are true, absestos fireproofing above the 64th floor [npri.org] could have prevented many deaths.
    • What all of this points to is that the issues are considerable more complex than any one or two sentence statement can do justice to. I watched the PBS program on the engineering of the towers, and the conclusion is that the design could have been better. You can't lay it all on the original engineering, but there were some big oversights. I have a lot of trouble with the fact that the central core and exit stairs did not have a reinforced concrete barrier. The fireproofing on the steel also needs to be looked at. We know they thought about airplane impact, at least from an accident standpoint even if they didn't predict that airplanes might be larger in the future. The fact that the fireproofing could be blown off in a impact was a risk that could have been considered, and should be for future designs. This is probably a solvable problem.

      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.

  • Uhhh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mav[LAG] ( 31387 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:05AM (#4401440)
    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.
    • It's pretty hard to stop someone once they have made up their mind to do something like September 11. If we had better airport security, they'd have done something else like rent a private plane, or even buy their own 747.

      When you have enough money, nothing is impossible.

    • Re:Uhhh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jimfrost ( 58153 )
      Actually there was no breakdown on September 11. The tools they used to take over the plane were allowed at the time, and really aren't that big of a threat anyway. If the box cutters had been found by security they would have allowed them to pass. Security was interested in massively destructive weapons (explosives, guns) because those were what were considered to be threats, and no such weapons made it through security on September 11.

      What the hijackers did that was special was take advantage of the psychology that had been drilled into airline passengers over decades, namely that if there's a hijacking you stay put and let it play itself out. That allowed a small number of hijackers to control a large number of people using primitive weapons that otherwise would not have been much of a threat.

      This worked in the past because previously hijackers weren't committing suicide, and live passengers were to their benefit. The September 11 hijackers were playing by different rules.

      In being successful at it they changed the psychology of airline passengers. We will not see another September 11 because the passengers will no longer sit around and let hijackers have their way. In fact, the technique didn't even last out the day ... as proven by the crash of the flight in Pennsylvania, and later by the shoe bomber. We could use exactly the same security procedures we used, with the same effectiveness, as before September 11 and such an attack would not succeed today.

      It's easy to blame the airline security people, but this was really an exploitation of mass psychology ... a social engineering hack if you will.

  • Eg. Newton versus Palm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cwernli ( 18353 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:06AM (#4401444) Homepage

    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.

  • WTC lessons -- what to look for in your building (Score:3, Interesting)

    by oakwood ( 602181 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:07AM (#4401445)
    Q: "Is there anything that could have been done in design terms to stop 11 September from happening?"
    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/2001 /12/19/usa tcov-wtcsurvival.htm

    "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.

  • The "intuitive" grail... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:10AM (#4401449)
    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.
    • ...are very different than user interfaces for software. Maybe in the future, when we can wave our hands around in the air like Tom Cruise in "Minority Report" (or the shuttle pilots in Earth Final Conflict), we'll have more intuitive user interfaces.

      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.)

    • I agree with you, except...
      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.


      Learning to use something as complex as a computer presents a huge steep learning curve to non-technical people. If the system has both an intuitive and a commandline interface, the new user will have a lot less hurdles to overcome to even begin using the system, as it makes the system a lot less daunting. Explaining drag and drop to my grandmother takes 5 minutes and she understands the concept perfectly. The Copy command and the command line have a lot more scope for errors, so I leave that until she actually has a need to move 1000 files.
  • Yoy say:
    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.

    • 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.

      • heh, I think you put it better:

        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.

        Than me :

        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.

  • dictator? how about a triumvirate (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stdarg ( 456557 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @05:54AM (#4401526)
    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.
  • "Is there anything that could have been done in design terms to stop 11 September from happening?"

    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?

  • Tyranny of the stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Beautyon ( 214567 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @06:25AM (#4401567) Homepage
    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.

    • I don't see how that could come about from open source software

      I cant imagine it, so it cannot be done. Riiight.

      I've already seen someone invoke Godwin's Law in this discussion (impressive), but I'll just invoke Clarke's 1st Law:

      "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

      Tim

  • I'm unimpressed and have suspicions. (Score:3, Troll)

    by twitter ( 104583 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @06:48AM (#4401613) Homepage Journal
    In this [acm.org] article he says, " I never look back at the stuff I've done. I look forward to where I'm going," and then tells us what an idiot he is. He berates his own shallow research and how much he screwed up his last book. Right now, I think he needs some more research.

    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 [jnd.org] 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.

  • this is a dead end (Score:4, Insightful)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @06:54AM (#4401630)
    Norman rightfully complains about the poor usability of current systems. He diagnoses a lot of microscopic problems and admonishes companies to spend more time on fixing their products. But that's no real solutions: companies don't have the time or money.

    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 fact emotions came first precisely because they are all about survival. Modern computers are pretty autonomous and run 24/7, performing a lot of tasks. With machines this powerful, survival is important, so putting emotions in the machine makes a lot of sense.


    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.

  • Door Handles?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the bluebrain ( 443451 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @07:44AM (#4401730)
    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.
    • Unfortunately, the brilliant British logic of water taps does not extend to showers. It would be great to have separate hot and cold showers :-).

    • Re:Door Handles?! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mr.Sharpy ( 472377 )
      The door handles comment was really kind of shallow on his part. He fails to recognize that in reality, for some people, round door handles are impossible to use. Take for instance people with arthritis or other disabilities that result in reduced grip. Grasping a door knob to turn it can be painful at best, assuming it is possible at all.

      This sort of oversight really shows the downfall of usability design dictated by a single person. That which is easy and convenient for one person, may be impossible or painful for another. A single person controlling design and function may be effecient, but that does not necessarily translate to better. It can also lead to insensitivity to the needs of those who do not conform to the ideal user the lead person has in mind.

  • Let users control font size (Score:3, Informative)

    by sambo99 ( 224628 ) on Monday October 07, 2002 @08:07AM (#4401788) Homepage
    I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...

    Let users control font size [useit.com] :(

    • I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...

      Let users control font size [useit.com] :(

      New Scientist has amazing control over font size. You can hold it near to your face, or at arm's length. You can even use a magnifying glass if you wish. You can even read it in the bath if you want.
  • Has there been a moratorium on Funny comments in this thread, or are UI design tradeoffs inherently boring?

  • Open source != design by committee (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jimfrost ( 58153 ) <jimf@frostbytes.com> on Monday October 07, 2002 @01:30PM (#4404104) Homepage
    I think he has a big misconception as to how design work happens with open source. It isn't the whole internet getting together to decide what is the best way to do things. If that were the case nothing would ever get done at all. Rather, open source is more of a democracy deciding which of many dictatorships should win.

    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.

Slashdot Top Deals

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

Close