Subject: Re: Some random thoughts on usability(OT)
From: Michael D. Crawford (crawford@goingware.com)
Date: Fri Aug 11 2000 - 17:34:50 CDT
Martin,
Thanks for the tips on tooltips and hiding the toolbar. It's great that
abiword does this but I'm afraid it's still an issue with the other
applications I use!
I think there is a deeper issue, though, about why some people like it
one way and some another. People really do have different styles of
thinking. It's not just a matter of preference, it would be like trying
to force a left-handed person to write right-handed (which used to be
commonly forced in the schools).
My wife is an artist. She was actually trained in the sciences but I
saw pretty early on in our relationship that she was never happy with
it. She's an inherently smart person so she could do well in a
technological career but she was clearly a round peg in a square hole.
Me, I'm a programmer, and I spend all day long typing in a plain text
programmer's editor. Not just that, but I like to write, and have
written reams of web pages and thousands of internet posts and I once
wrote what one manager at Apple said was the best test plan he'd ever
read. A marketing guy who read my plan, which I'd written in word, said
"This looks like TROFF!"
In some people the left hemisphere of the brain is the dominant one, and
this hemisphere thinks verbally, logically, can comprehend spatial
things in a precise way, and if you're a left brain thinker the dot-coms
will hire you but the chicks will think you're a square.
In other people, the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant. This
hemisphere thinks in pictures and non-verbal sounds.
I'm very left-brained when I use my computer. I can do right-brained
activities too - I like to paint and draw and play the piano, but
interestingly I do not like to do art or music on a computer. I have a
number of good graphics packages, a graphics tablets, and a high quality
electronic keyboard (a Fatar controller - this has the best keyboard
feel of any electronic piano keyboard) but I don't use them. I play an
old-fashioned analog piano that was made in the 40's.
But I just love spending all day long on my computer writing code and
participating in slashdot discussions.
My wife only uses the computer when she has to. And when she does, she
only uses windows because that's the one system she knows and she's not
willing to learn anything else - even if she believes something else
would be easier. She always full-screens her windows and she rarely
runs more than one program at once. And she only selects a menu item if
there's not a toolbar icon for it. She never needs to read the
tooltips.
I studied physics at CalTech, where Roger Sperry got the Nobel Prize for
his work on understanding brain hemisphere function by experimenting on
split-brain patients, people who'd had their corpus callossum cut
usually to cure severe epilepsy caused by "storms" between the
hemispheres. I was told by a friend that they'd tried using CalTech
students - all of them either science or engineering majors at a very
selective school - as controls but they performed worse than the split
brain patients on the tests for hemispheric coordination. They had to
actually get regular people who weren't geeks.
Mike
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