Learning happens when attention is focused. …
If you don’t have a good theory of learning, then you can still get it to happen by helping the person focus. One of the ways you can help a person focus is by removing interference.
–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.
Point of view is worth 80 IQ points … it’s not logic that is powerful. Logic is actually a weak method because it depends on fragile chains of inference. And people have used logic throughout history but mostly in inappropriate context.
There’s nothing illogical about the way the alchemists did things, it was that they were in a context where there logic couldn’t do much. so it’s this notion that the context is powerful, and if you want to be able to be good at solving problems and acting much smarter then you are then you have to find the context that will do the thinking for you.
Most computer scientists know this because it goes under another heading “choose the appropriate data structure before you start tinkering around with the algorithm”. If you choose the right data structure it will have most of the result computed almost automatically as part of its inherent structure.
–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.
There are many related anecdotes about solving the right problem.
President Barack Obama, and two other presidents, have retaken their oaths of office, because of some mistake with their inauguration. That means a little over one in fifteen presidential oaths were botched. If that sounds high, it is. But only because people make mistakes.
That’s why, we must make our software so that people can recover after making a mistake.
In 1987, Alan kay said,
By the way, Sketchpad was the first system where it was discovered that the light pen was a very bad input device. The blood runs out of your hand in about 20 seconds, and leaves it numb. And in spite of that it’s been re-invented at least 90 times in the last 25 years.
Almost 50 years after Sketchpad, you can find a light pen at any computer store today. Today, these light pens are used to supplement more circulation-friendly input devices. Maybe that’s enough to solve the problems Sketchpad had.
Personally, I think the metaphor of a the pen is too blindingly strong. People love their pens, because they grew up with them. I don’t accept that they are the pinnacle of input. We can do better then copying a pointy stick filled with dye.
But I have my own biases and unique experiences. I am dysgraphic — I have trouble writing legibly by hand, and spelling. To me a pen is not something that feels good or puts me in the zone. It’s something that gets in the way of expressing my ideas. But fundamentally, isn’t every input device a barrier between your mind and the medium?
Matt Gallagher tells how he reverse engineered the link between Xcode and Interface Builder. Very interesting, I learned a lot. I’ve done essentially the same thing with iChat. (And in retrospect it might have been a bad idea, because it’s broken on Snow Leopard).
There’s a great comment thread on designing credit-card readers to be more obvious, over at uiandus.com.
And this one, from Chris Clark, sounded the most cost-effective and simple to me,
An idea: put the scanning mechanism into the main body of the machine (in this case, the left) and give the inactive side of the swiping channel a very low profile.
The channel should be deep enough that your card doesn’t spill out during a swipe, but shallow enough that you can see that the magnetic strip won’t be touching anything if you slide your card with the strip facing ‘out.’
If people work with the assumption that the magnetic strip must touch something to work, this design removes the perceived affordance of the ‘wrong’ side.
You could get the same effect by using clear plastic on just the “short” side. But I prefer Chris’ concept, because clear plastic will get dirty, scratched, and opaque, but empty space will stay empty.
There are lots of great comments, and I don’t know enough about building these things to know which plan would give the most bang for the buck in reality. So if this problem interests you read the blog and pick a winner for yourself.
(UPDATED 2009-02-12: I wanted to clarify why I’m ignoring the most obvious and right answer, of having a sensor in each side of the machine, so there wouldn’t be a wrong way to swipe the card. My understanding is that doing that would be too costly. If that isn’t the case, then I’m deeply disappointed in every credit-card reader I’ve used, and the cheap bastards who opted to save a few bucks to inconvenience all their customers.)
From an Interview with an Adware Author,
Sherri Davidoff
You wrote adware. You bastard.Matt Knox: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. I got to write half of it in Scheme, which probably means that I deployed more Scheme runtimes than anybody else on the planet.
So are most scheme programs in the wild used for evil? That’s a depressing thought.
Powered by WordPress
