Comments on: On magic, or the appearance thereof

By: Clark

Clark — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:30:31 +0000

Rob, agreed, there’s a barrier, but that’s true for all computational environments. Though the GUI is now familiar, at one time it was quite confusing (drag a disk to the trash to eject it?). And we’re still learning about touchscreen affordances (cf the iPad). However, the HyperCard interface had that nice ‘incremental advantage’ (learn buttons, you could do some; learn fields, you could do more; same with backgrounds; then there was a bit of a step up for HyperTalk, but even that could be learned incrementally). Agreed, if the curve is too high, but start with widgets that as you explore and learn them, you get incrementally more power, but at the surface level they’re consistent with *a* metaphor.

Suzanne, yes, we still badly use the affordances we have: we don’t communicate the designer’s model to the user, we are inconsistent, etc. While we have the capability, we don’t take sufficient and intelligent advantage of it. Just as we have bad elearning, we have bad software training too. As I think Negroponte said: “the future is here, it’s just not equitably distributed”.

By: Suzanne Aurilio

Suzanne Aurilio — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:30:35 +0000

I’m not sure we’ve arrived yet, particularly as regards learning and performance support design. I still see too many users (designers and end-users) stumbling, fumbling and grumbling with the technology. The assumption that the limitations are “between our ears” rather than between those of technology designers, or are the limitations of the technology is one that often rubs my fur the wrong way. Have you noticed for example, how inefficiently most people use computers do everyday workplace computing 8 hours a day? How can that be? On the one hand, you’d think humans would have by now learned a few more of those sly keystrokes programmers know. On the other, you’d think some PT person in their multinational would have figured out a solution by now. Sigh…:)

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:28:14 +0000

Its not important to your main point about designing unhampered by the preconceptions and limitations of previous designs – with which I entirely agree – but I do recall one problem with using actual magic as an interface metaphor: nobody knows how it works.

Or more precisely, half of people have no concept of that underlying structure to magic that is so crucial to using it as a metaphor, and the _other_ half all have very specific, very different, and very contradictory ideas of that structure. The metaphor is only useful when it has positive correspondences that you can draw on, and you’re aiming at a moving target. When my users were trapped in a game and the goal _was_ the game, I could just build a little mythology around my version of magic and encourage the players to learn it – its not like they had any choice if they wanted to accomplish the goal of playing the game.

But to bring it back around to the wider sense of interface design, here your user / customer / apprentices _do_ often have a choice on how to solve their task. If I make it too difficult to learn – even if it is immensely more powerful – quite a few people are going to just drop my magic interface and go back to their old broken desktop. Its what they know. So you have the task not just of convincing your _designers_ to think outside the limits of familiar design, but your _users_ as well.

Actually, having used that word, the model of magician’s apprentices does make for a nice segue to cognitive apprenticeship and collaborative learning, but I’m already rambling and should go back to work…