Why does he believe I am a genius? Because I understand computers; that is, I can usually fix problems and perform simple maintenance activities on our home computer, which remains to him a complete and utter mystery. Computers are such a mystery to Mark that a question I might ask in preparation for a backup, like, “You do keep all your documents in your ‘My Documents’ folder, don’t you?” confounds him.
And yet, Mark was an early computer user. He was using the first computer I bought for myself, an Osborne Kaypro II, in the early 1980’s. He wrote an entire novel, as w
ell as numerous short stories, using that computer. What’s that sonny? You’ve never heard of a Kaypro II? It had a whopping 64K of memory and a green character display. It used something called “floppy disks” for all, all data storage, and it had an operating system called CP/M. It also had a word processing program called Perfect Writer which could only be used when you inserted the floppy disk containing this program into drive A – then you stored your documents on the floppy disk in drive B. Although not a rocket scientist, Mark managed to use this computer quite adeptly, including its spell checking capability which he sorely needed, as long as it consistently behaved as he expected.And nothing much has changed today. He can use our Windows XP Home Edition PC, with the broadband Internet connection and the 1 GB of memory and the 225 GB storage just fine for useful work such as financial tracking in Quicken. He can back up the Quicken files onto a CD. He even Googles, now that the browser on his desktop has been set up with Google as his homepage.
(One time I set his browser homepage to point to a document that said HELLO MARK!!! instead of to the usual Google site. The next time he opened the browser it gave him quite a shock: "How do they know who I am??").
Mark can use this computer quite well to accomplish all sorts of useful tasks, as long as it consistently behaves exactly as he expects it to. And this is a key challenge for those of us in the software business--to make it so easy to use that it makes sense to Mark. The more I think about it, the more I think that may be rocket science after all.
2 comments:
IHMO, trying to design software that "consistently behaves exactly as he expects" is indeed rocket science or perhaps science fiction :).
I think a goal of "is perceived by the average user to behave consistently" would be a good start. If we achieved that, we would be ahead of where we are today.
Beyond that, I could see all sorts of possibilities such as, "learns my paradigm and can successfully infer my intent much of the time, but accepts change gracefully" :D
Agree. It is bugs that are most confounding - better quality is one way to increase consistency. And our ultimate goal should be that computers learn our paradigms and infer our intent (although we humans often have trouble doing that among ourselves, let alone teaching computers how to do it!).
Post a Comment