Subject: Re: Some random thoughts on usability(OT)
From: Michael D. Crawford (crawford@goingware.com)
Date: Fri Aug 11 2000 - 18:05:55 CDT
> I can't overstate how hard a computer can
> be to use for people not like us!
To understand how far computers can be from some people's day-to-day
thought process, consider the case of the poor user who called me for
tech support for one of our macintosh products one day.
My boss had already emphasized to me the importance of sizing the user
up so you know when to say things like "click the mouse in the OK button
until it turns black".
I said to the user something like "click the mouse in the window to
bring it to the front" and he replied "what's the window?"
This fellow was an experienced macintosh user. He had already owned his
mac for a while before he bought my product. Thinking that maybe he
just didn't know the GUI term I used alternatives like "document" and so
forth.
It turned out that his best guess for what a window was, was the big
glass thing on his desk in front of him that looked like a TV set and
had lots of shapes, words and colors all over it. I talked it over with
him for a while and apparently he had no comprehension of the items
drawn on the screen as being objects at all. He just saw an endlessly
shifting, confusing mass of colors, shapes and words.
He's probably have been a lot better off using DOS or the Unix command
line with no X (and it certainly was easier to do tech support when
there was no GUI; you could ask the user to read the screen verbatim and
spell out the commands unambiguously - it's hard sometimes to walk
somebody through a GUI over the phone).
I figure he had some kind of perceptual disability that prevented him
from recognizing objects that aren't physical objects - kind of like the
way a cat won't notice if a dog on TV is barking at it. His experience
of using a computer sounded as confusing to him as reading a complex
legal brief would be to a dyslexic person.
The amazing thing was that he used a computer at all. Remember using
computers back in the really early days when the only UI was typing in
octal after hand-assembling your machine code? But people still found
computers useful and went to the trouble even though the experience of
using them was so slow. This fellow must have found them just as
unsatisfying but for some reason persisted in them.
Mike
crawford@goingware.com
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