…Knuth has a terrible track record, bringing us TeX, which is a great typesetting language, but impossible to read, and a three-volume set of great algorithms written in some of the most impenetrable, quirky pseudocode you’re ever likely to see.
There, it’s been said. But let the posse note I wasn’t technically the one to do it!
Fundamentally, a computer is a tool. People don’t use computers to use the computer, they use a computer to get something done. An interface helps people control the computer, but it also gets in their way. Inevitably, any on-screen widget is displacing some part of the thing the user is trying to manipulate.
As an infamous example, expanding Microsoft Word’s toolbars leaves no room for actually writing something,
(Screenshot by Jeff Atwood)
Users don’t want to admire the scrollbars. Truth be told, they don’t even want scrollbars as such, they just want to access content and have the interface get out of the way.
I highly recommend Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Tufte’s teachings are rooted in static print. But many of the principles are just as valuable in interactive media. (And static graphics are still very useful in analysis and presentation. Learning how to graph better isn’t a waste of time.)
Tufte’s first rule of statistical graphic design is, “Show the data” , and it’s an excellent starting point for interface design as well.
Cathy Shive has an excellent post expanding on Tufte’s term Computer Administrative Debris.
The Chartjunk blog showcases a few real-world examples of Tuftian redrawings.
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.
Paradoxically then, the better the design, the less it will be noticed. We should strive to write our interfaces in invisible ink.
Recently, a Microsoft datacenter lost thousands of mobilephone user’s personal data.
A common response to this story is that this kind of danger is inherent in “cloud” computing services, where you rely on some service provider to take care of your data. But this misses the point, I think. Preserving data is difficult, and individual users tend to do a mediocre job of it. Admit it: You have lost your own data at some point. I know I have lost some of mine. A big, professionally run data center is much less likely to lose your data than you are.
It’s easy to convince yourself of this anecdotally. Look around you, how many people people that you loosely know on Facebook have you seen complain about losing all their contacts when they lost their phone? I’ve seen at least a dozen such announcements. But nobody I actually know has been affected by this recent fiasco, or complained about losing contacts in any other “cloud” failure.
But people have a bias to overestimate risks they can’t control, and underestimate risks they can control. So we reinvent the wheel, and lose our own data ourselves.
Hey, I do it too. Actuarially, I really should be paying wordpress.com to manage this blog.
There’s no point in trying to recover from a
mallocfailure on OS X, because by the time you detect the failure and try to recover, your process is likely to already be doomed. There’s no need to do your own logging, becausemallocitself does a good job of that. And finally there’s no real need to even explicitly abort, because anymallocfailure is virtually guaranteed to result in an instantaneous crash with a good stack trace.
This is excellent advice. Peppering your code with if statements harms readability and simplicity.
It’s still a good idea to check large (many MB) mallocs, but I can’t imagine recovering gracefully from a situation where 32 byte memory allocations are failing on a modern desktop.
A programming language is a tool for handling design complexity. That’s what all of computer science is, really — languages, libraries, type systems, garbage collectors, everything you learn about programming. They’re ways to build more and more complex designs without losing your grip.
The way you manage complexity is to be able to ignore it. A good programming tool lets you forget about some part of the problem, so that you can focus on some other part. And it ensures that when you return to the parts you forgot, you haven’t accidentally broken them.
Years ago, When I was taking to programmers about what college I wanted to attend, I had in interesting conversation about how Computer Science education is an utter failure at preparing students for real-world programming. Outside of Software Development, no technical field accepts (sometimes prefers) candidates with “N years of experience” in place of a degree. I’m not sure I know why CS education fails so badly and universally. But my current best guess is that it’s because school never exposes you to enough complexity. Projects have to end in a semester. You never have to deal with a multimillion-line program, written by hundreds of co-workers, dozens of which you need to collaborate with, at unexpected times, for surprising reasons.
From Wikipedia, a story of color-coding gone horribly wrong in Afghanistan,
HDRs (Humanitarian Daily Rations) are typically air-dropped into the disaster area on large pallets. The HDRs initially dropped in Afghanistan were yellow, before it was realized that the packages were the same color, and approximately the same size, as American cluster bombs, which were also dropped in Afghanistan.[1] Later packages were made in an orange-pink color described as “salmon“.[3]
(Emphasis mine, some links altered, perminant link to the quoted Wikipedia revision.)
I’ve written before about pitfalls of color coding.
…control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.
Jeff Raskin calls this principle it monotony, and explains it comprehensively in The Humane Interface.
I’ve always felt a little uneasy about the idea. Computers are supposed to free us from tedium and repetition, by doing things for us. A fluid interface is unnatural yes, but the goal of computing should be to exceed what’s possible in the corporal word, not to copy it imperfectly.
But fundamentally, I think Raskin and Molbug are more right than wrong. Paradoxically, dumb interfaces beat smart interfaces most of the time.
When it comes to building the physical world, we kind of understand our limitations. We build steps. … We understand our limitations. And we build around it. But for some reason when it comes to the mental world, when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stockmarkets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations, even though they don’t stare us in the face in the same way, we could design a better world. And that, I think, is the hope of this thing.
—Dan Ariely, concluding a very entertaining TED talk. The transcript is up, but I liked his delivery so much I watched the video.
Stairs and ladders aren’t an implication that you’re too weak to pull yourself out of a pool. Yet amazingly people sometimes get insulted by simplified interfaces, as if it somehow implies they are so stupid they can’t handle complexity.
I was fortunate enough to hear Jonathan Ive talk about launching the iMac. As he was leaving a store on launch-day, a furious technology reported accosted him in the parking lot, shouting What have you done? He was incensed that the iMac was so cute, approachable, and untechnical — everything that he thought a computer shouldn’t be.
Some of this behavior is explained by simple elitism. If computers are hard to use, than it keeps the idiots out, and proves what a macho man you are if you can use them.
But I suspect refusal to accept our cognitive limitations is also related to our cultural refusal to accept mental illness. Quoting Mark C. Chu-Carroll’s experience with depression,
How many people have heard about my stomach problems? A lot of people. I need to take the drugs three times a day, so people see me popping pills. … Out of the dozens of people who’ve heard about my stomach problem, and know about the drugs I take for it, how many have lectured me about how I shouldn’t take those nasty drugs? Zero. No one has ever even made a comment about how I shouldn’t be taking medications for something that’s just uncomfortable. Even knowing that some of the stuff I take for it is addictive, no one, not one single person has ever told me that I didn’t need my medication. No one would even consider it.
But depression? It’s a very different story.…
Somewhat over 1/2 of the people who hear that I take an antidepressant express disapproval in some way. Around 1/3 make snide comments about “happy pills” and lecture me about how only weak-willed nebbishes who can’t deal with reality need psychiatric medication.
I confess to being thoroughly mystified by this. Why is it OK for my stomach, or my heart, or my pancreas to be ill in a way that needs to be treated with medication, but it’s not OK for my brain? Why are illnesses that originate in this one organ so different from all others, so that so many people believe that nothing can possibly go wrong with it? That there are absolutely no problems with the brain that can possibly be treated by medication?
Why is it OK for me to take expensive, addictive drugs for a painful but non-life-threatening problem with my stomach; but totally unacceptable for me to take cheap harmless drugs for a painful but non-threatening problem with my brain?
If we can accept that our brains are fallible, like everything else, and that this isn’t somehow immoral, we can build a better world.
…I’d rather have the text of Clay’s speech than the video. For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks. Plus, it’s smaller and cheaper to ship around. Plus, it’s searchable. Plus, it works on more devices. (I acknowledge that only the first of these is fundamental; but that alone would be enough).
Videos, speech, etc. will always carry more emotional content. But for consuming ideas, text offers the highest bandwidth and most precision. Unfortunately, writing well takes time, and can hinder conversation.
Conceptually, I believe illustrative pictures and infographics are valid elements of modern text, like links, or typography.
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