stevenf:

A friend (who I know only meant this in lighthearted jest, and I don’t mean to pick on you specifically) sent me a link to this, saying it seemed to support the theories in my previous post.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re somehow still not sure how the IT industry got its reputation as a bunch of smug, holier-than-thou assholes, look no further.

I’m weary of this notion (even when presented as satire) that anyone who can’t master a computer must clearly be mentally retarded.  The personal computer of 2010 is hard to understand for novices and people who struggle with abstract concepts. Macs, PCs, all of them.  Folks, it’s us, the freaks who understand drive partitioning, regular expressions, virtual disk images, task switching, and shell scripting — we’re the exception.

So while we trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image.  Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is. If we hadn’t been there for every step of the personal computer evolution since the days of DOS and AppleSoft, I wager we’d find it pretty bloody confusing as well.

How heavy do we let this backwards-compatibility albatross get?  Do we really have to continue to baffle and frustrate millions of people because a handful of people just can’t live without their 4-way virtual desktop window manager?

If you, Mr. and Ms. Not Retarded Computer Expert are half as smart as you claim, then surely it won’t break you to relearn a few UI conventions, no matter how ingrained.

Since the days of the Apple ][, C64, and Atari 400, all we’ve done is add, add, add. Add more features to sell more computers. We’ve never stopped to take anything away. Because we’re afraid to let go of what we’re used to for something that might be better. Better for everyone, not just you.

And I’m fairly sure this isn’t just an idle fantasy playing out in my head. I’ve watched firsthand as people who’ve struggled to do basic computer tasks as long as I’ve known them pick up an iPhone and be cruising around within hours, if not minutes. For people who do not already thoroughly understand computers, New World devices are easier to understand and easier to use.

“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things. The whole concept and attitude towards icons and hieroglyphs is actually counterrevolutionary — it’s a language that is hardly ‘user friendly’.” — John C. Dvorak, 1984

Maybe all of us hardcore types don’t remember (or would rather not admit) scoffing at the Mac/PARC interface model when it first appeared. Now it’s all but standard, industry-wide, even for many Linux distributions. Only now that sufficient time has passed that the nay-sayers mostly have anonymity can we look back and admit that it was a genuine improvement over the command line without the shame of having to admit that we, the super really smart people, were wrong.

And so it is, I believe, with the New World devices of 2010.

If you haven’t already, go read Fraser Speirs’ “Future Shock” for another point of view.