hindsight/user experience

[Leif]

Karl Hegbloom Wrote: 
> 
> Ok, so suppose one of those 5 buttons doesn't work, and so now she has
> no clue what could be wrong or how to fix it.  She reboots,
> reinstalls,
> waves a rubber chicken, phones tech support and says what?

She doesn't. I set the computer up, so she calls me. She wouldn't know
what a reinstall is. Why should she ? She did not break the buttons,
but it's her fault somehow ?

Karl Hegbloom Wrote: 
> If she has no knowledge upon which to form a realist understanding of
> what could be the matter, how will she report the bug?  (Oh, you can
> report bugs?)

Why does she need this knowledge ? You may, I definitely do, but that's
because it's what I do for a living. People get into this kind of
expectancy in all fields of work, I hope you realize that. Just the way
some computer geeks think all newbs are fools for not knowing the inner
workings of their computer, plumbers think non-plumbers are fools for
not knowing how to fix their pipes, florists think non-florists are
fools for choosing a bad combination of flowers for their arrangement.
It's called specialisation, and our society is built on it. 

Karl Hegbloom Wrote: 
> And tech
> support people should not have to continually answer the same silly
> questions about things that really ought to be common knowledge.

If you're working tech support, your job is to answer questions. It's
tech support for god's sake, not quantum physics research. It's not
supposed to be fun. Before you flame, please note that I am working as
tech support part-time right now, and after having passed the "oh my
god these people are retards" phase, I now answer every question with a
smile, because that's what I'm paid for.


Karl Hegbloom Wrote: 
> I think most people have some understanding of how their automobile
> works, for example.  They know it has "an engine" that "burns"
> gasoline.
> They know the basics of how an internal combustion engine works, that
> it
> has an electric motor to get it started, what the battery is, what a
> radiator is and what it's for, how to check the oil, when to take it
> in
> for a tuneup...  It's that level of understanding that I'm talking
> about, not an advanced degree in computational psychology.

This is a misleading analogy that gets tossed around often. The reason
we know these things is that given the current hardware, this is about
as simple as we can make cars while keeping it safe.

Given the current computer hardware, we can make things A LOT simpler
on the software level. It is entirely possible to have a computer
system at the simplicity level of a television, and this is the
direction things will inevitably go towards, and I for one am happy for
this. Finding bugs and hacking around with configuration intricacies
should be a choice, and not a prerequisite for using a computer.

I've got another analogy in mind: the tivo. It's basically a computer
dedicated to one purpose, running a stripped down OS. Do you expect
people to know how it works ? No. What if tivo expanded to do one more
thing, let's say offer direct movie downloads (for all I know it
already does this, we don't have tivo where I live :) ). Do you expect
people to debug it now ? How about if we add music to the mix ?
Internet browsing ? Chatting ? Email ? Through all of these things, it
is possible to keep it simple enough that when you press a button it
does what you expect. 

There's a reason why you see tivos all across the US, and not myth-tv
boxes or such, cool as they may be.


-- 
Leif