The latest trend in interface design seems to be making computers speak like humans would. This is why many interfaces today have eschewed precise wording or technical terms in favour or lighter-hearted, vaguer words.
We're no longer "processing data," we're "thinking about it," and a post wasn't made "seventeen seconds ago" but "just about now." Everywhere blogs and usability books are telling us this is a step forwards, the fresh new approach that will help humans interact with computers and relate to the information or tools they are interacting with.
Call me old-fashioned, but nothing irritates me more than these attempts at dumbing down interfaces. When a friend tells me he did something "just about now," I am always free to ask for more detail should it be of importance to me, for whatever reason. When a web application tells me the exact same thing, I have no way to know what it means by that. Is it a few seconds? A few minutes? What if the difference were of importance to me?
That new interface trend is yet another attempt at anthropomorphism. We would like our machines to speak to us like a good pal would. A few years ago, we had cute assistants jumping on screen in an attempt to make the computer look like our beloved cat or parakeet. A few years earlier still we had fortunes in terminals goofing around with us like that beatnik roommate from college.
Now, all this is fun, of course, and I do find a perverse pleasure in reminiscing about cute animated assistants but the main thing I expect from my computer is not cuteness. It is accuracy. I also expect friendliness, of course. However, friendliness and cuteness are two very different things. (Look at me, I'm friendly, but I'm far from cute…)
Our UNIX fathers lived by the sound principle of "garbage in, garbage out." Ruling one's life by a string of approximations, no matter how cute, is hardly a way of achieving greatness, truth or even peace of mind.
Certainly, there are moments where approximation is, indeed, welcome, and these are the very moments when friends use such language. Unfortunately, the application has no way to know whether or not the information it is displaying is of crucial importance to me or not. It is forcing me into a thought process that is not mine, instead of letting me apply my own to elegantly presented raw information.
Of course, one might argue that Twitter hardly conveys important information or that nobody died from Flickr inefficiency. That's true, but it's slowly changing, and I fear someday planes may be landed "somewhere close to the runway" because it makes flight instruments so much more friendly indeed.
Kidding aside, the question here goes beyond interfaces. As a society, as a group of users, we are not only accepting imprecision, which is a fact of life, we are making it into a rule, something to be resurrected after years of building computing technology for the very purpose of eliminating it.
Maybe, someday, technology will have gotten too precise for our own good or understanding, and then, we will need to dumb it down to grasp what it has to say. In some ways, it already has gotten to that point in some areas: nobody needs a candy thermometer that measures hundredth of degrees. However, voluntarily suppressing information that is within our grasp and understanding, such as minutes or even seconds, is not making things practical, it is making them hazier and sloppier.
Every time we are tempted to be sloppy, may we all remember Internet Explorer 6 and its permissive, developer-friendly blinking fonty blip of a rendering engine.
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Patrick — Two very interesting observations indeed!
The first shows how difficult it is to speak clearly and concisely, even when keeping a model constantly under one's eyes. I guess it would be possible to translate information into everyday English in a consistent manner, but it would certainly require more attention to detail than any developer could spend on such matters. I guess Mail's current nomenclature is thought to be easier on the eyes and on the mind, but it does make for a few very jarring contrasts.
The second point you raise would indeed be the next logical step in our voyage towards perfect anthropomorphism. I am sure someone is already working on reputation algorithms that would allow the machine to distinguish our "friends" from our "business acquaintances" and take appropriate action based on the relationship we entertain with a correspondent. It does seem like a lot of work for very little gain, however…
The problem I have with the anthropomorphic-vague-user-friendly approach to communicating information is the switch in formats. By that I mean that for a given application, some information is communicated in one format, and other information OF THE SAME TYPE is communicated in a different format.
For example, here is a snip from my Mail inbox:
From Subject Date Received
Joe Past Due! Today
Fred IOU Yesterday
Bill Pay me now December 31, 2008
In the Date Received column, some information is formatted relative to today (the first two) and some is formatted month-day-year. That's annoying.
Also, why is the Date Received column the only column with this inconsistent formatting? Why doesn't Mail reformat the information in the From column like this:
Old From New From
Joe Close Friend
Fred Father
Gill William X. Gates, Jr.
Why is the Date Received anthropomorphasizable and the From not?
@Josh — Thanks for the kind words and, of course, for taking the time to comment!
We are probably few to hold such a view, but I do not see anthropomorphism as a good thing in computing, mainly because computers cannot hope — at least within our lifetime — to accurately reproduce the thought processes and emotions of human beings. In that light, even a successful anthropomorphic interface will be humanoid at best, but not quite human. The exact studies escape me at the moment, but it has been shown that we find it more stressful and more difficult to interact with something masquerading as a human than with something that is either perfectly human or not human at all. The original Office assistants certainly qualified as wholly non-human, but I feel we may soon be entering dangerous territory.
As for mixing both simple and complex interfaces, this is indeed a very good question. My take on the subject is that computers as we know them should have a learning curve and, therefore, would probably serve us well with just a command-line interface. Indeed, while I appreciate the importance of ease of use in everyday or purpose-driven objects — such as a coffee-maker or a digital camera — I feel the power of the modern computer, that can do pretty much anything and everything, would benefit from not being too readily accessed. By that, I do not, of course, mean that access to computers should be restricted or that only certain people are worthy of computing. I do, however, mean that graphical interfaces inevitably invite a certain degree of mindless clicking around that can be dangerous. (I think, for example, of Trojan Horses.) Command-lines, by nature, give us pause and, while not perfect, require that users construct queries in their mind before they act out on them. This, in many ways, is an increasingly useful safety net, duplicated in the latest iterations of Firefox (for example) by the insertion of counters that prevent users from clicking too quickly on some buttons.
What do you think?
Hopefully your thesis was that access to more complex interfaces need to be retained *in addition to* presenting a more 'user friendly' alternatives. Otherwise I'm afraid I cannot agree with you.
I worry about throwing out the baby with the bathwater; abstractions are generally considered a 'good thing' in computing, simplifying interfaces at the cost of flexibility. Graphical User Interfaces, Object Oriented programming, etc.
A good example that I think you'll appreciate is OS X: I feel that Finder is a deceptively simple program in many ways, but it still pales when compared with the command line interface (Terminal). Luckily, Apple retained the CLI and anytime Finder begins to constrain me I can just drop 'down' into the CLI and muck about from there. A higher-level interface co-exists with a lower-level interface and both have their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Indeed, isn't an "attempt at anthropomorphism" the ideal in CS? A full-on biometric interface, voice and multi-touch and holographic and all the rest? Artificial Intelligence as an OS?
As an aside, I think your writing is improving. Kudos on that.
@Anonymous — That can indeed be infuriating. I guess Dashboard has been designed for desktop computers, that run more or less all the time, and whose users calls upon widgets frequently. Yet, I would venture to guess these narrow parameters are seldom met.
@anonymous99 — Thank you, I am 99.99999563% happy you took the time to read this post, and send a comment. Do call again!
@Mike — I appreciate your feedback, but I feel somewhat obligated to point out I am not discussing installs or downloads in this post, as you are very right in pointing out it is nearly impossible to predict how much time they will take. As for getting a life, some of us need to revel in triviality so that others can lead theirs to the fullest extent. Think of me as your guardian angel in a purple cloak.
@Duane Williams — Apart from some artistic and delicate downsizing courtesy of the very fine folks at the O'Reilly art department that picture is quite authentic. You'll make me blush…
FJ wrote: "(Look at me, I'm friendly, but I'm far from cute…)"
If the pic attached to your article is authenticate, that latter claim is not true. ;)
"call me old fashioned"
No, I'll call you a silly whiner instead.
I have never seen the 'just about now' quote you get so wound up over (what app was that? or did you make that one up), but I'm sure it won't mean 'in a few minutes' or it would have said that.
The 'actual seconds countdown' interfaces that I have seen were always wildly inaccurate, so I I'm sure that was one of the primary reasons to move towards more vague descriptions. Evidently there is simply no accurate way of knowing exactly how long a download or install is going to take and the precision you so long for just isn't there.
So quit your whining and make sure you lead a full enough life that takes you away form staring at progress bar and get all annoyed (nothing irritates you more? really?) over something so unimportant and trivial.
I'm 15.9543734354 percent pissed at the author of this post.
Apple's stock widget on the Dashboard is always telling me that the quotes were "just updated" despite the fact that, quite often, the widget was last dreawn several hours ago. If you leave the widget up long enough, it will eventually retrieve new stock quotes, which may be wildly different than those that were "just updated." More often than not, "just updated" actually means "sometime yesterday, before the markets opened today." It's about the dumbest way to communicate when the quote is from that I can think of. Is there some reason they can't say "just updated (12-22-2008 11:34AM)"
I was genuinely surprised to see such a dramatic inaccuracy coming from an apple product when I first noticed it during Tiger's beta, yet it is still there today. Dumb.