Richard,
Interesting observations, though I guess that makes me a great deal
younger than my biological age; perhaps the reason also that my last
wife was 25 years younger than I was. I always use the command keys,
even to the point of creating my own (when possible) if I don't like
the ones provided or they're not provided at all. Now if my eyes and
body were just as young! (huge grin)
Joe Wilkins
On Jun 28, 2007, at 10:11 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
Björnke von Gierke wrote:
Developers will tell you their believes, but users will tell you
what they need.
Users will tell you what they think they need, which may not be the
same as what they really need. They know what they've done, but
may not know the range of what can be done. Direct observation of
users will yell you what their limited experience with the
vocabulary of interaction analysis can't.
The rest of what you wrote is all very relevant and rock-solid,
with this one consideration that may be worth adding:
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're over 30 years
old. If so, we're in the same club. Ours is the club that grew up
before the Internet was invented, back when owning a computer in
one's childhood was still considered "geeky", and perhaps for good
reason since you had to write many of your own programs, and those
programs had to fit on a disk that was literally floppy. :)
Flash forward to the 21st century:
Everything you wrote is true, esp. in the third world where people
have had no exposure to computers at all, or in the developed world
among people older than you and me.
But among the majority of adults in the developed world*, the
learning patterns you describe are extremely short-lived, likely
less than 5% as long as they were for our generation.
As just one very small but telling example, I personally know no
one under 30 who doesn't use command keys for Cut, Copy, and Paste,
but only about half of my over-30 friends do so. Such an anecdotal
guestimate can't take the place of real research of course, but I
would venture to guess that such research would show my estimates
to be conservative.
In most of the developed world computing has become so ubiquitous
that young folks pick it up as though through osmosis. Our culture
is so immersed in computing that the word "computer" is fading from
use as quickly as "computerized" began to fade as early as the
1980s. We're moving into an era in which it's almost meaningless
to refer to computers by their generic name, so young folks don't
use that word as much as they use "MySpace", "blog", "email", and
other words that describe the specific uses which connect the
machine to their lives. When they refer to the hardware, they
almost never refer to it using the generic "computer", but by more
specific terms like "Mac", "Dell", "laptop", "Sidekick". And their
use of text messaging is so pervasive that even at the college
level work is submitted with spelling reflective of that medium.
We're in a brave new world.
So while I agree with everything you said, I would caution
designers to be very careful in cases where a design favors
presumed learnability over usability.
Learnability is a critical component of ergonomic design of course,
at least on par with usability, and for marketing arguably more so
since without adoption there can be no productivity.
But it's an area that demands user testing for a good evaluation,
esp. if the designer is over 30. You and I think we're clever with
all of our computing experience, while young people take most of
what we know for granted.
Dem young'uns is all gone cybernetic nowadays. :)
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
___________________________________________________________
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com
* I really dislike the term "developed world", and cringed as I
wrote it. But "post-industrial nations not only in the West but
globally which have sufficient technological parity with the EU,
Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and similar regions" seemed a bit wordy.
One of the things I hate about "developed world" is the implication
that anything not meeting its definition is "undeveloped",
conjuring a sense that the value of a people is derived primarily
from an assessment of how economically beneficial they are to
someone else.
Am I being over-sensitive here, or appropriately aware? What
better term might there be than "developed world"? I must have
picked up the phrase in public school in the '60s, and stepped off
the fashion boat too many ports ago to know what the contemporary
phrase would be. Thanks in advance if you can help bring my writing
into the 21st century.
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