Chapter 4. The Dancing Bear

Even when survivors know that an interactive product makes them feel stupid, they cannot generally point this fact out without appearing to whine and complain, because they are surrounded by apologists. Nobody likes to complain, so survivors feel strong social pressure to join the apologists, make excuses, and blame themselves for their bad performance. But the instincts of the survivors are better than their conscious efforts to compensate. The software does make them feel stupid, and it doesn't have to. If you are one of these people, you might be asking yourself, "Just what does he mean by bad software? It gets the job done, doesn't it?" In the rest of this chapter, I'll describe what I mean by bad.