Olego (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} olego) wrote,@ 2009-03-02 23:56:00 |
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Tech Support
All software engineers should watch Medieval Helpdesk. If you don't have the patience for the whole 3 minutes, at least watch the last 30 seconds. It illustrates the not-well-enough-known "grandparents" problem: how do you explain the computer to your grandparents?
Take a concept of a window. Sure, a window, in Win32, is represented by a handle HWND, and is created using CreateWindow with a class registered using the RegisterClass() API. Too technical? Okay, then a window is a rectangular picture that can be dragged around, minimized, or closed. (My grandparents like to use the word "frame", because it certainly does not look like a window to them.) And a menu is... Wait, what's a menu? You sometimes have to right-click, sometimes double-click, but sometimes only single-click?
On a more philosophical level, only in the last two centuries has technology really advanced far enough that there is a divide between knowing how to use something and knowing how it works. Take the abacus: you learn what it is by learning how to use it. Same with a hammer, or a matchbook, or a mirror, or a musket that you have to clean and reload after every shot. Once you introduce the telephone, the radio, or the television, you must create concepts to describe the things that most people will no longer observe: electromagnetic waves, the electron gun, amplitude modulation. Computers are a few steps above that, with objects that don't even exist. On a typewriter, if you press a key, the hammer strikes the paper, and you see a letter. On a computer, if the "window" doesn't have "focus", then your text disappears into the void. By now your concepts are so abstract, that none of the things you do are actually real. Your brain is forced to carve reality out of these digital concepts.
Which is easy when you're young; but if you spent 60 years of your life with typewriters, a pop-up dialog box is something you'll have a hard time visualizing. So make UI as intuitive as possible!
All software engineers should watch Medieval Helpdesk. If you don't have the patience for the whole 3 minutes, at least watch the last 30 seconds. It illustrates the not-well-enough-known "grandparents" problem: how do you explain the computer to your grandparents?
Take a concept of a window. Sure, a window, in Win32, is represented by a handle HWND, and is created using CreateWindow with a class registered using the RegisterClass() API. Too technical? Okay, then a window is a rectangular picture that can be dragged around, minimized, or closed. (My grandparents like to use the word "frame", because it certainly does not look like a window to them.) And a menu is... Wait, what's a menu? You sometimes have to right-click, sometimes double-click, but sometimes only single-click?
On a more philosophical level, only in the last two centuries has technology really advanced far enough that there is a divide between knowing how to use something and knowing how it works. Take the abacus: you learn what it is by learning how to use it. Same with a hammer, or a matchbook, or a mirror, or a musket that you have to clean and reload after every shot. Once you introduce the telephone, the radio, or the television, you must create concepts to describe the things that most people will no longer observe: electromagnetic waves, the electron gun, amplitude modulation. Computers are a few steps above that, with objects that don't even exist. On a typewriter, if you press a key, the hammer strikes the paper, and you see a letter. On a computer, if the "window" doesn't have "focus", then your text disappears into the void. By now your concepts are so abstract, that none of the things you do are actually real. Your brain is forced to carve reality out of these digital concepts.
Which is easy when you're young; but if you spent 60 years of your life with typewriters, a pop-up dialog box is something you'll have a hard time visualizing. So make UI as intuitive as possible!
