Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots
37signals.com
37signals.com
One absurdly frequent source of customer issues with Bingo Card Creator was "I have no effective mental model of the file system, data as separate from programs, and how the physical location of a file relates to my physical location in the world."
I have a huge number of customers who think that letters live in Word and bingo cards live in Bingo Card Creator. If you think like that, you might be unpleasantly surprised when you take your CD and install your Bingo Card Creator at school, and then Bingo Card Creator doesn't have your bingo cards in it any more. Actual quotes: "Did it lose them?", "I think my CD must have a virus." (People have been socialized to think that anything that goes wrong is, depending on the person, operator error or a virus/malware/etc.)
When I released the online version of Bingo Card Creator, which essentially dispenses with the file/folder metaphor, this issue vanished. poof Their bingo cards really do live in Bingo Card Creator, for all intents and purposes. (Putting "cloud" support in the downloadable version, on the other hand, was a crashing failure -- probably a failure of communication on my part.)
I think file systems are the new registry: something which should be hidden behind several signs saying "There be dragons here!" and which power users can be allowed to tweak, so that they can brag to their wives "Yep, it took me a while, but I opened up a folder on my C drive and found your file, then I copied it to your desktop. I'm good with computers, what can I say."
"Our job, when designing features and interfaces, is to make them powerful, usable, and understandable. Not to cater to those people too lazy to think. Our job is to make things intuitive. But intuition still requires an individual to want to understand something. It requires an attempt to understand. It requires thought, even subconsciously. We have little power over people’s desire to succeed. We can only provide the tools to do so. So teach people, don’t criticize them."
There was no sense of play and the fear of "Blowing something up" was always there and I wondered how anybody could learn with that kind of fear.
I can understand getting frustrated but fear of the machine was baffling but I got a good glimpse on how "regular" people reacted to technology.
People want stable machines that never break no matter what they do. Once we actually get to that point, maybe people will stop being so afraid but we aren't there, their fear comes from experience of things breaking on them.
I think I conditioned everyone in my family to be more afraid of letting me near electronic equipment with a screwdriver than the equipment itself.
{edit} On the other hand, you also have people that constantly break things as a result of their own actions, and refuse to change. My friend's sister would be constantly corrupting her external hard drive because she would just yank the plug to remove her laptop from her desk. My friend would fix things and repeatedly tell her not to do that, but it would always happen again.
People are all over the spectrum. There are people that are just downright afraid of new things, and there are people that just take everything for granted (not caring what the consequences of their actions are).
In the short term, your friend should tell her that she won't fix it anymore (or should have, whatever).
In the long term, thats a design problem. Not that I know how to fix it, but the idea that you can't just disconnect is something that needs teaching. If we can find a way that people can disconnect hardware (e.g. USB drives) that would be a good thing.
However, I understand the fear of the machine though. Most people are fearful when they first begin to drive, first begin to use power tools or begin to fire weapons in uncontrolled, unsupervised scenarios.
Computers, assuming you're simply using the machine and not trying to stick objects into the power supply, don't. It's ridiculous the fear some people have of simply using a computer.
I remember a line from some short-lived sitcom Tony Danza once starred in. Speaking to his new computer, he says, "You look like a TV, but you're not a TV. You're an evil TV." There's an anxiety and apprehension with computers that, IMO, exceeds the bounds of rationality.
I could be entirely wrong though. I think it is very difficult for those of us that understand technology to understand how those people must feel about things. It is for me at least.
I think more than anything there just hasn't been a good enough effort to help people get up the first part of the learning curve as they often have no idea where to start and people haven't been taught how to protect themselves, etc.
I agree with the earlier post that software designers have to want to make things simple, but people have to want to learn how to use it.
On the other hand, one time about 10 years ago, I used a friends computer to print out a flier that I had made for a nightclub promotion. The name of the file had a cuss word in it. I forgot that I had copied it to the desktop to print it and the parents freaked. They were only a little bit mad about the cuss word. They thought I had put a virus on their machine because I changed the Desktop. They threatened to call the cops and try to have me kicked out of college. I calmly went it over there, explained that it was only a picture, and right clicked and erased it.
Until that point, I never realized that some people didn't know that you could place files on the Desktop of a computer.
No. The problem is that Apple did not release anything else. They did not release a product for "professionals." Thus, some, perhaps many, IT people are upset because they were looking forward to a useful tool, and instead got a toy for mom.
edit: And I want to add, there is no sign at all that an Apple tablet netbook will ever be released. Many people are frightened that the iPad represents where Apple is going for all of their product line.
What is realy apsent from the mind of older generations is the idea that computers are just tools, albeit imensly powerfull ones, and as with all tools we need time and especially motivation to learn how to use them.
Personally, I don't give a damm how my car works but I had to learn how to use it to get form one place to another and it would certainly be much harder to do it if every other car had a radically diferent set of controlls.
Computer usage is more like math. It's something you just need, part of every day life, though many people still hate it, as it is more flexible. GUI's really share similar concepts, you just have to adapt them, and if people hate one word, than it's adapt - seriously hate.
You really have time to figure out how things work and GUI's are really no rocket science to figure out.
Nobody expects users to become system administrators or application developers, but answering questions about self explaining clickable graphical elements is very painful. (With a little endurance you could probably get a chimpanzee to understand most of our 'modern' UI's).
What is telling is that for as long as we've had the familiar "full UI" of a "real desktop", many intelligent and motivated people still struggle with many of the conventions. Have you ever marveled at the fact that most desktop software in 2010 still defaults to destroying your work? And if you do want to keep your work, it insists that you give it a name, a name which must be unique and must not contain certain characters that the computer is entirely capable of understanding, and then it asks that you choose where in some invisible hierarchy you want to keep it (even though the answer in almost every case is is "where I can find it again"). All of this complicates something that might as well be done with pen and paper.
These are things that everyone who uses a desktop interface has to get used to, and there are some good reasons that they are the way they are, but they aren't necessary things for the task. It is possible to safely shed all of these conventions and end up with something that still gets the job done, possibly better than the traditional desktop way.
Computers can be very powerful tools, but I am not sure many people are really interested in using that power -- I think many, even those who grew up with computers, would like the details to go away.
To follow your car analogy, cars used to be much more complicated to operate than they are now. Modern cars have electric starters, automatic chokes, and in many cases automatic transmissions, for instance.
Apple is simplifying things with iPad, Google is heading in the same route with Chrome OS, and I'm sure there are many other players we haven't heard from yet. It's going to be very interesting how things eventually play out.
Of course, the ideal is to leak minimally; Apple has always been good at that, but very bad at allowing anyone past the abstraction in the event that it breaks down. I believe the analogy is "sports cars with their hoods welded shut."
Keyboard and mouse computers are not designed around our natural abilities, they are an acquired skill. If a system can accomplish the same tasks (email, word processing, calculations,...) without requiring a training and indoctrination program, then that is better and should be the end goal. The iPad (and future tablets and augmented reality devices) is going to do just that, and that is a very good thing indeed.
Once, I put a folder on her desktop to download some images to, and she freaked out a bit. Funny shit for me, but a good learning experience as well.
Edit: This is one example. I have other, smaller, examples.
My grandmother just played a Wii for the first time. Now my Grandmother has NEVER seen the thrill of video games since she first saw them 16 years ago. I mean she had no desire to play any whatsoever. When she saw me with the Wii she actually said "looks like fun, can I try?" and we played a game of bowling on the Wii. She didn't quite get the buttons but the motions she did and she had an absolute blast.
Its all about interaction with the computer, and letting people interact with it in a natural way. Geeks care about "multitasking" on a computer, non-geeks care about their computers always running at top speed for any application they use. They don't care that you can have 100 windows open at a given time, just the fact that 1 is open and works well and they'll close it an open another. How many people here enjoy the fact that the blackberry allows multi-tasking and you have to spend time worrying about background processes sucking up your cpu?
I think this is the reason why the chrome os has tons of potential.