Moving slightly off topic, but I'll keep the subject line
On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Dan Lockton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm particularly interested in how "modern superstitions" like this develop
> and are perhaps guarded against (people deliberately using false
> user-agents, or simply giving false dates of birth, e.g. to hinder
> Facebook's profiling ability).
>
>
I believe that folk theories of our systems (better called "conceptual
models") arise because the designers deliberately or incidentally hide
their workings.
Thus, even the most sophisticated of people have no clue as to how their
systems work. Vint Cerf, one of the early inventors of the Internet, former
president of ACM (Computer sciences professional organization), etc., just
wrote an article complaining about his lack of understanding and the lack
of assistance from help lines.
Me too. I was a VP at Apple, and when my machine would misbehave, i would
call in the very people who had programmed it. They would shake their heads
and say "gee, i never saw it do this before. I have no idea what is
happening."
I went to a technical talk at IBM Research once, and the speaker couldn't
get his computer to display the demo. An engineer rushed up to help, then
another. Soon there were 10 IBM engineers all trying to figure it out.
Nothing worked.
(Eventually they discovered the culprit: the internet service was down. A
simple flaw, but because it gave no signs, and because the demonstrator's
program assumed a fully functioning internet, he didn't bother to program
in a message saying that it couldn't get to the internet, so 11 people
wasted 20+ minutes of their time (and the same amount of timed for the 100
people in the audience).
I ask people what email they use, and they often tell me the name of the
browser they use to get to it. Cloud systems are especially difficult
for most people to understand: is your email what you see on the screen? Is
it stored somewhere in your computer? Or is it stored in the "cloud"
whatever that is, wherever that might be? The answer could very well be
"all three."
How are we supposed to understand how things work when all the mechanisms
are hidden? Yet the human mind craves explanation, so the result is that we
make up stories to explain what we experience. hence, folk models.
If it is anybody's fault, it is those misguided designers/engineers
who think less information is better.
Well, less is indeed better if everything works fine. But when problems
arise, then less leads to a mess: there is no indication of
what happened or what can be done. And when two people sitting side by side
type the same query into Google and get different results, how are they
supposed to know how to interpret this difference?
It's a fascinating topic to study. I could write a book about it. Oh, I
already did.
Don
Don Norman
Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego
[log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/>
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