The Dancing Bear


On the other hand, if you made me choose between my knife and my keyless system, I'd toss away the knife in a New York minute. Immediately after first using my keyless entry system, I couldn't imagine ever not owning one. It is the single most convenient feature of my car, and I use it more often than any other one. I use it 10 times to every 1 time I use the knife. In spite of its weak and clumsy design, it is still a wonderful thing. It's like the fellow who leads a huge bear on a chain into the town square and, for a small donation, will make the bear dance. The townspeople gather to see the wondrous sight as the massive, lumbering beast shambles and shuffles from paw to paw. The bear is really a terrible dancer, and the wonder isn't that the bear dances well but that the bear dances at all.

The wonder isn't that the keyless entry system works well, but that the keyless entry system works at all. I am very willing to put up with interaction problems in order to gain the benefit of remote entry to my vehicle.

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The prodigious gifts of silicon are so overwhelming that we find it easy to ignore the collateral costs. If you are stranded on a deserted island, you don't care much that your rescue ship is a leaky, rat-infested hulk. The difference between having a software solution for your problem and not having any solution is so great that we accept any hardship or difficulty that the solution might force on us.

The difficulty of devising a better interaction isn't what makes the problem so intractable. Instead, it is our almost universal willingness to accept bad interaction as an unavoidable cost. When we see that rusty rescue ship, we don't question its accommodations but just jump on and are glad for what we get.

Software experts are of necessity comfortable with high-cognitive-friction interaction. They pride themselves on their ability to work in spite of its adversity. Normal humans, who are the new users of these products, lack the expertise to judge whether this cognitive friction is avoidable. Instead, they rely on the cues offered by the nerds, who simply shrug and say that to use software-based products you have to be "computer literate." Software engineers blame the technology, telling users that difficult interaction simply comes with the territory, that it is unavoidable.

This is not true. Difficult interaction is very avoidable.

Cognitive friction doesn't come from technology, but from the people who control technology. They are masters because they know how to think in ways that are sympathetic to silicon, and they imagine that everyone thinks in the same way. They create technological artifacts whose interaction is expressed in the terms in which they are constructed. Instead of creating an automobile that is all leather and burl wood, they would create one that is all hot steel and grinding gears. As engineers, they think more about gears than about leather, so the interface to the human user is expressed in those "implementation" terms, which is why I call products designed this way as having an implementation model.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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