The thing isn’t broken, the design is

[dc]

I thought this report was interesting: half of all “malfunctioning” products are in full working order, it’s just that the poor bloody customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices. Even worse for them, companies frequently dismiss them as ‘nuisance calls.’ It was a nice touch that the study being reported involved giving managers products to use over a weekend:

The managers returned frustrated because they could not get the devices to work properly.

A nice glow of Schadenfreude there.

This report didn’t surprise me, nor did Elke den Ouden’s conclusion that Most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process: product definition — which I take to mean that they never clearly worked out what it was they were trying to do with the thing. I’ve been thinking for a long time that many examples of modern technology have been designed by people who have given no thought to how real people would interact with the devices.

Take digital cameras. I have a nice wee digital camera which I got for nothing because a friend got so fed up with trying to get it working that he thrust it at me, saying Here, take the bloody thing, I never want to see it again. Now, I have (it seems) some sort of talent in sitting down with a bit of technology and figuring out how to use it without too much difficulty. It didn’t let me down here: within five minutes of trying to get the camera working, I had taken several pictures and transferred them to the PC. I mention this, though, not to show technologically challenged my friend is (though he really is), but to show that I have little problems most of the time with technology and software. (It is ironic that I regularly advise people like my friend to RTFM while I have hardly ever read a manual myself.) Yet not so long ago, a bunch of us were looking at another digital camera — I think it was at l_zinkiewicz’s leaving drinkies do — and none of us could figure out how the thing was supposed to work. We might as well have been trying to read quipu when were prowling through those menus.

It seems to me there are two basic problems with a lot of modern kit:

1. It has been designed by people who have a fixed idea about how they would use it, without considering whether or not it would even occur to someone who hadn’t been involved in that process to use it in that way.

2. There is huge over-reliance on icons. Most icons are completely meaningless to anyone seeing them for the first time, yet a lot of kit (and software — but at least you might get tooltips there) has nothing but icons to indicate what you are supposed to do. This was, by the way, the problem with that camera. Little or no text, just a lot of obscure wee icons.

All of which is a pain, and it irritates me that, for example, my mother got a mobile phone a while back which is almost unusable because of a hideously badly designed menu system (she has to enter a number manually every time she wants to call it). I do worry, though, about the application of such design techniques in areas such as aviation, or the military, or car design.

Comments

[tanngrisnir.livejournal.com]

I doubt the average user would see those demos and set about installing betas to try them. The choice is one of Linux’s strengths, not a weakness. I loathe Gnome, but some people love it — I can use the sort of desktop I like, and so can they.

I don’t get what you mean by this:

but then you might not be able to use the same email client as your friend who uses KDE when you’re using Gnome.

In the first place, what does your friend’s email client have to with the email client you use? I think I’m missing your point. In the second place, just because something is a “Gnome” or “KDE” application doesn’t mean you can only use it from that desktop environment. ATM, I am running KDE and using a newsreader which is supposedly designed for Gnome.

WRT too much choice — it depends what you mean. I don’t think that you can have too much choice when it comes to how you want to use your system, so I have no problem with the wide range of software which came with this distro (SuSE as it happens, though I have used others), and I don’t see that having different desktop environments to choose from is a bad thing. I also have no problem with the range of distros. There are those you need to be a bit techie to use (Debian, perhaps, or Slackware, which was the first one I ever tried), and those you don’t, such as SuSE or whatever Mandrake’s called these days.

On the other hand, when it comes to options within a piece of software, you certainly can have too many options (one of the things I don’t like about a lot of MS stuff). Or, at least, you can have too many options presented to the user at one time. What you need, really, is all those options but handled so that the user only sees those which are relevant to the task at hand (so you don’t get the image manipulation features when you are editing a block of text, for example). It would also help if there were less reliance on obscure icons.

The thing I don’t like about a lot of Linux distros now is that it is possible to set them up to boot into a particular user’s session without a login/password being required. That’s Not A Good Thing.

[wibbble]

> In the first place, what does your friend’s email client have to with the email client you use? I think
> I’m missing your point.

I was thinking about how most non-business people end up trying Linux: because they've got a friend who uses it. So now their friend goes 'oh, I use KMail for my email - I can't help you set that up', and they discover that KMail doesn't like to work under Gnome, or works but not quite as well as it should.

I still think that for your average non-technical user, lots of choice is a bad thing. It's nice for you or I to be able to pick which distro suits our style of computer use, but J. Random User just needs to be told to install Distro X because it'll work. Unfortunately, even for the same target audience there's multiple competing distros, so it ends up being 'Distro X if you want to use KDE, Distro Y if you like Gnome' - at which points they're now completely lost.

This kind of choice is both Linux's strength and its weakness. It makes it really popular for geeks (and for server usage), but it hurts widespread adoption with home users.

Mac OS X actually defaults to logging the user in without a username or password - for a system with just one user, it's a sensible default. (If someone's got physical access to the machine, your username/password aren't going to slow them down much anyway.) It's easy to switch to different models of login, though (the normal username/password text fields, selecting users from a list then typing a password, or even using US Government-issued swipe cards, apparently). And it supports fast user switching, so you can have multiple users logged into the GUI at one time, which is really nice.

[tanngrisnir.livejournal.com]

Actually, as far as I can see there would be no problem with running KMail under Gnome. And email clients are hardly that difficult to set up, not these days. Anyone who can set up KMail could probably help his pal to set up whatever mail client they want to use. :)

The thing about JR User is, he or she would probably go for a name they had heard of, such as Mandriva (I think it is), SuSE, or something like that. They aren’t all that likely to try to set up Slackware or Debian or Xandros. Most of the well-known distros know come with KDE and Gnome (as well as other options) — you don’t have to pick a distro for your desktop, you can install both and try them out, then stick with KDE the way most sensible people do. :o)

It is now the case that a reasonably technically competent random user — I am specifically excluding here certain of my friends who can barely play a CD in a CD player; I mean someone who can make a fair stab at programming a standard VCR (not some of the ridiculously complex ones) — could be told, Go get [distro], install it, and use it. In fact, it has got to the point where you could say to them to get a magazine which has the given distro on a cover disc, and they could install it and use it. Linux used to take a horrendous amount of tweaking — not any more. Install it, it works. Connect a bit of hardware, it works. I dare say sooner or later something wouldn’t work when connected, but I haven’t had any problems in that line for a long time. You don’t even have to mount/unmount devices now: the system handles it.

WRT passwords, with a lot of people, having physical access to the computer wouldn’t help them much if they didn’t have your login and password. That aside, though, a sensible set-up has an admin login for handling software installation and system admin stuff, and that only, with normal use being through a user account with limited permissions. That provides a lot of protection against fuckups. (I also think that some people should never, never, never be given the slightest suggestion of admin access, even if that means they need a geek friend to set up some stuff for them.)

User switching/multiple users logged in... Now that is real old hat from the Linux POV. :o)

[wibbble]

If someone has physical access they don't /need/ your passwords: they can simply boot the machine from a LiveCD and access everything as root - or just open it and remove the HD.

Mac OS X, by default, disables root - sudo's available, but you can't log in as root. 'Administrator' users (including the first user, by default) are in the wheel group, so they can sudo.

Multiple instances of X11, and switching between them, is certainly something that's been around *nix for years, but it's definitely beyond the install-and-forget kind of thing you're talking about. The big strength of Mac OS X isn't so much that it's introducing never-heard-of-features, it's that it's making them effortlessly to use.

[tanngrisnir.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't put it very clearly. Yes, I know that if someone has access to the machine they can do what you say (in fact, I did it myself to one of my hard drives after a catastrophic double crash — and come to think of it, it wasn’t that simple, since you had to know how to set permissions) — what I actually meant was that most of the people you need to worry about getting unwanted access to your machine don’t have a sufficient level of knowledge to do that. For them, having a password restriction is a good safety measure.

There was the case of the guy whose laptop was stolen on the Tube. The gits who stole it clearly were stymied by the fact that it didn’t boot Windows, and then demanded a password. They left it on the Tube in disgust and he got it back, intact and with his data secure.

It used to be the case that you just couldn’t install Linux in such a way that it could boot without having to enter a login and password. I don’t know which distro had the bright idea of allowing direct boot into a user session, but I think it is foolish. I suppose we should be grateful for the small mercy that those distros which put up a menu of users on the login screen don’t include root there.

Actually, the switching between different sessions isn’t beyond the install-and-forget thing. It’s sitting there in the KDE menu, and a helpful dialogue comes up to tell you what’s going on if you don’t already know.

I am not only impressed at how effortless these new distros are, I am actually surprised.

[wibbble]

You're not the only one that's surprised. :o)

I'll be sticking with Mac OS X, though, for any machine I need to interact with directly. I was planning to get an AMD64 machine later on this year so that I could work on some stuff locally, but it would probably be a box without a monitor.