Striped Background in OS X Revisited

[Richard Gaskin]

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
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       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.