Graham Chastney

Is software intuitive ?

I used to have a manager who disliked any software change, he hated GUI software for at least 10 years after they were commonly used. His way of branding the problems was to state that the software wasn’t intuitive. By this he meant that when he wanted to do something that involved stringing a set of actions together it wasn’t clear to him what the next step was that would enable him to achieve the desired effect. Another way of saying this would be to ask if the software uses common sense.

Common sense seems to be a good way of describing the issue but actually there doesn’t seem to be much agreements on what common sense is:

“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” – Albert Einstein

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” – Thomas Alva Edison

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” – Gertrude Stein 

One thing is sure though common sense must make sense to at least one set of people.

The problem with common sense is that there is so much of it around. It’s common sense that you drive on the left in the UK, but it was clearly common sense to most of the rest of the world to drive on the right. It’s common sense in the UK that you write the day before the month and then the year; but in other countries (USA) it seems to be common sense to put the month first. It’s common sense to me to turn the light off when you leave the bathroom, but clearly no-one has told my children. The file system is the most common sense way of looking at the data stored on my hard disk but clearly not to Sue and not to others too. It’s common sense to a Nokia user like me to press the down key to get to the address book, but not to Jonathan who uses some other thing.

Some people talk about the browser being more intuitive, but I’m sure that it is. It may well be that it’s just presenting a simpler set of option and hence easier to understand. On most sites there are only a limited number of things that you can do after all and there is often only one thing to be looking out for – a hyper-link to somewhere else. As web pages become more interactive and bi-directional the issue of intuition comes back again.

Over the last few days I have been ranting a bit about the lack of process that accompanies many collaborative infrastructure implementation, but the other issue is that the software doesn’t follow my own personal common sense. I’m not going to get into details here, but it drives me nuts, but I’m not sure this is a common sense issue or simply a me issue. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it would need more people than that for it not to be common sense.

Perhaps I was talking more about common sense the other week when I was talking about respect. Not sure though, I think they are different issues.

If the Internet is going to get more interactive and the number of functions is going to increase it needs to build a global common sense which we all understand.  People are already doing it in their own space but that is requiring them to define common working process and agreement at quite a detailed level. This is a huge undertaking though, probably bigger than any other definition of common sense that we have ever done. This definition of common sense needs to cover every culture, every language, every device type and huge variety of functions. Personally I think that this is ultimately an impossible task and not because it is too hard, but because we humans don’t actually have a single common sense; that’s what makes us human.

We humans use our difference in common sense to innovate, to derive a new common sense. Imagine that we did agree a global common common sense – how would we ever change it .

Perhaps a global common sense is completely the wrong answer and a demonstration of what is wrong with the browser experience we offer today. Traditional browser applications inextricably link the data and the function. If you want to deal with this data you have to do it via the built in function for that individual page. Client/desktop based applications don’t do that. Take the issue if dictionaries and spell checking. On my client almost every application uses the same dictionary function and settings, this function knows which words are in my personal dictionary. When I use spell checkers online every one of them uses a different dictionary, some of them won’t let me use a real English one (only American). It’s a basic function but I don’t get any joy because there isn’t (and never will be) a global common sense for it. The saddest part of all of this is that there is a whole industry out there trying to sell people portals so that they can bind their staff into a corporate common sense that will stifle innovation and eventually bleed the organisation of any vitality. I’m not arguing here to go back to client/desktop applications, I’m arguing that we need to get on with splitting the functions from the data and delivering initiatives such as service oriented architectures (SOA) that allow people to derive their own common sense, which might be a browser based application, but might be a piece of client code, it might also be an automated engine that does something without being asked. The great thing about common sense is that there is so much of it.

Those of you who have read this blog over time (and especially those of you who read Happenings) will know that I like a metaphor. Actually some article I wrote using the car as a metaphor for IT device form factors is still one of my most popular posts.

Today Phil Windley picked up on Dave Winer’s metaphor for the Internet – fishing. Rather than seeing the internet as a set of places to visit Dave used the phrase:

Now, happily every time one of my contacts puts up a new picture, it shows up in my River of News and gets hooked on my fishing pole.

Phil’s comment was:

Second, the metaphor of “rivers of news” and getting “caught” on Dave’s fishing pole are ones I’ve used before in presentations and articles. I think it describes the reason why RSS is important and why using it is an adjustment for some people. They think of the Web as a collection of places to go visit rather than as streams of information to stand in and enjoy.

I really like this idea of the Internet transitioning from a relatively static reference entity into a dynamic thing that sweeps past you, like a river. The water flowing down the river doesn’t go away. It still exists and can be collected from further down the river if you want to or even from the sea, but that doesn’t stop the river flowing. We can set up nets and collect things from the river. As with fishing I am sure that there will be a great market for people who understand where best to fish.

I no longer see the Internet as a set of places to visit, and didn’t before I saw this metaphor, but the metaphor helps. Why should I go and visit places to see if there is anything interesting to see; why should that be my job; why can’t the information infrastructure tell me that there is something new – the joy of RSS and syndication. I get increasingly frustrated when working with teams of people where they want me to visit a web site or application on a regular basis to see if there has been any update. I came across an application the other day that sent out email updates but put it into the hands of the author to decide whether other people should be told about the update, what a ridiculous idea. I want to decide what I get told about.

All I need now in the Christmas season is some kind of RSS feed from the physical shops telling me that something interesting has come in rather than walking the high street in the full knowledge that what I am looking for doesn’t exist .