On Following Directions
I have long been fascinated by a particular divide among users of technology: those who follow a step-by-step process, and those who “get it”.
This first came to my attention about seven years ago when I decided to learn how to use the video switcher in my high school’s TV station. I took home the manual for the summer and started going through it. For weeks I was frustrated, not because I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted it to do — because I could — but because I didn’t know what I was doing. It was: press these two buttons at the same time, then slide the knife down, then push this one button again. I just didn’t didn’t know why. There were fundamental concepts of signal flow in the switcher that I didn’t know at the time, and that lack of knowledge led to an inability to understand what I was doing. It wasn’t until I finally realized what was going on, the “ah ha!” moment, that I could stop thinking so hard and just use the darn thing.
Unfortunately (from my extensive observation of friends and family), most users of computers and other consumer electronics never have that moment. The reason, I believe, is an inability to see beyond the two dimensions of the user interface. Interfaces have structure (as poorly thought out as some may be), and so do what they control. For example, the typical universal remote control has a series of buttons to change which device the rest of the buttons will affect. When I see such a remote, it is clear that it is modal, that pressing one of those buttons is akin to putting down the TV’s remote and picking up the remote for the cable box. To many people, however, it is little more than rote: push the TV button before using the volume buttons; push the Cable button before using the channel buttons.
What is happening here is two-fold: first, the user fails to see the modality of the remote, seeing it as just a flat series of buttons. This is compounded by an obliviousness of the signal path in the TV/cable box system. If a worst-case user were asked to avoid the remote altogether and walk right up to the units, it is possible that they would know to use the channel buttons on the cable box and the volume buttons on the television without fully grasping that the cable box is actually sending the video signal to the TV. It is easy to see that this situation gets very messy very quickly by adding an amplifier into the system. Unless you understand that the audio and video signal originate from the cable box, with the video signal being sent to, say, the Composite 1 input on the TV and the audio is being sent to the Audio 2 input on the amp, it’s all just a confusing mess. Add to that the need to sometimes (who really knows when!) push the AUX button on the remote in order to change the volume, and you have a very dissatisfied user.
The same premise can be applied to computers. It is difficult for many people to see past the flat monitor into the hierarchy and order of a file system or menu- and document-based application. Every once in a while, when I’m first getting acquainted with a particularly large or complex piece of software, I don’t necessarily understand the flow of the program. It can all seem like a bunch of buttons and menus. A bunch of buttons and menus, which, when pushed, change other buttons and menus, can be very intimidating.
Take what is a very simple and elegant process: installing an application on Mac OS X. A disk image file is downloaded to the Downloads folder. By default, the image is automatically mounted, so it shows up on the desktop. Dragging the application from the window that displays the contents of the disk image to the icon that represents the Applications folder makes a copy of that application in that folder. Once it’s there, just unmount (eject) the disk image and put the image file in the trash. (Note that the key here is understanding things like how the icon represents the folder, and a folder can contain other items.) By thinking about this process from the mindset of someone who doesn’t understand the concept of a hierarchical file system, let alone disk images, one can imagine how convoluted and seemingly unnecessary it is. To a great many people, you get what you want on the computer by double-clicking the thing that says what you want. When the disk image automatically mounts and a window containing the application opens, that’s the end of the process. Just double-click the pretty new icon and that new version of Snood is up and running. Oh, what confusion ensues when after rebooting that disk image no longer appears on the desktop!
Wizards are an attempt to guide such users through complex processes with a simple question-and-answer interface tied to a decision tree. They can be decent, but what the computing world may need is something like what the Logitech Harmony 1000 remote has [tried to] bring to the remote control world: a flatter interface with fewer clicks, albeit with fewer options.
These occasional glimpses into how (it appears to me, anyway) most people see and experience their technology can be very enlightening — and frustrating, because this lack of understanding, this “how” as opposed to “why”, is holding back a great many people from using technology to its full potential.
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