All your brakes are belong to us!
People seem to think that computers should be easy to use.
No. No. No. No. NO!
There's a very good reason that computers should be difficult to use, and there's lots of evidence to back this up. The reason is that life is hard. Computers can make your life better, the can not make it easier.
It's pretty simple really. There are only two ways to make life easier:
- Have the person get more skilled at living life.
- Take their life away from them and give it to someone who's more skilled than they are.
When you make anything "easy to use" you invariably take away the user's control and give it to someone else.
Not something else, which seems to confuse people.
Let's look at a similar industry to compare: If I make your car easier to drive, I've taken control away from the driver. An automatic transmission is easier to use than a manual transmission, but an automatic transmission may not choose the correct gears for a certain situation. A skilled driver will always choose a better gear than an automatic transmission ... that's why manuals get better gas mileage. I drive a standard because I always have the ability to choose whether I want power or efficiency in my gears. Every automatic I've ever had the displeasure to drive gets it wrong constantly. I mean, honestly, how could a transmission possibly know that I'm pulling out into traffic and need to accelerate fast? How could it possibly know that I'm coasting down a hill and it's perfectly fine to be in fifth gear even though I'm only going 25 MPH? Note also that automatic transmissions wear out faster than manuals.
The same thing could be said about anti-lock breaks and traction control. Hell, I can make any car have anti-lock breaks ... just pump the breaks! Remember when they used to teach that in driving classes? What I bet most people don't know is that anti-lock breaks add a few feet to your minimum stopping distance, and you can't turn them off. Thus the decision to pump the breaks has been taken out of the driver's control.
What auto manufacturers should be focusing on is a better way for the driver to control his vehicle. How about paddle shifters so I don't have to take a hand off the wheel to shift? Sounds like a fantastic safety feature, so why do only high-end sports cars have it? Of all these vehicles with traction control, nobody has designed an interface to allow the driver to determine how much power to send to each wheel!
Forget all the sci-fi movies you've seen for just a moment and remember that your car's computer does not make these decisions for you. A bunch of guys in a lab who you've never met made these decisions (on when to pump the breaks and when to install updates to your Java) before the car was even manufactured. The computer is just a tool, to think the computer is making the decisions is to believe that I'm talking to my cell phone, not the person on the other end!
Our world is breeding a generation of idiots. The average person on the road today doesn't have a clue how to drive a car. He just turns the wheel and hopes for the best. The road even tells him how fast to go and when to stop. Long gone are people who could correctly estimate the safe speed for a turn, the signs will tell you what it is.
Our society has bred a world where everyone expects someone else to take care of them. I see it all the time.
The world of computers is suffering terribly from this. Wonder why you get so many computer viruses? The "industry" will tell you it's because you don't have a proper antivirus installed on your computer, but the reason is very different. The reason is because you're not educated enough to know what it's safe to do with your computer. I've never used antivirus software, and I've never had a virus on my computer either.
Every time your computer gets easier to use, it's because some of its operation is being hidden from you. At that point, you have less control over it and you have to trust someone else to take care of it for you.
I have a novel idea, how about we stop valuing "ease of use" so much, and start placing some importance on education and self-improvement!
It pisses me off to no end to see friends at the mercy of their computers. It pisses me off even further that they've been so thoroughly indoctronated that there's nothing that they can do about this. You try to get rid of the Microsoft and they suddenly have to learn something and they're screaming to get the "ease of use" back. Whatever happend to self-betterment? How about understanding how to use something?
I don't think it's that people are afraid to learn or unwilling (although there are certainly some people who fit those descriptions). I think it's been drilled into them time and again that they can't until they actually believe it.
Hell, when you use something like Microsoft Word, which claims to have a grammar checker, but is so stupid that it constantly says, "this sentence is very long. Long sentences are confusing. You should break this into shorter sentences." when what it really means is "You're ability to construct sentences is better than my programming can validate." Hell, after a few term papers being put down like that, about anyone would believe they're incapable of learning.
Of course, the whole point of this post is that computers shouldn't be easy to use.
Because every time they get easier to use, they open security and usability holes that the user no longer has the ability to fix.
And when they're truely useful, their ease of use isn't related to the computer, it's related to the problem. As Alan Kay said, "Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." If you think a computer is going to make complex things simple, you have unreasonable expectations. Be prepared to be disappointed.