The Right Glue

(2009-02-10 18:07:48)

I'm the kind of guy who thinks about stuff that exists solely so you never have to think about it. Things like user interfaces. Sometimes things even more subtle and pervasive than that, like why some technologies even exist in the first place.

For example, I know why desktop search applications are so damned popular, and why Microsoft never thought of it until Google introduced the idea to the masses. Think about all of the version of Windows up to Vista. None of them had any kind of search functionality other than an inefficient "look at every file every time you want to search" algorithm. Google introduced an application that pre-computes an index over all of your files to make searching faster and it was incredibly popular. Microsoft obviously had the capability of creating this kind of software, since Windows Search was released with Vista to compete with Google Desktop.

There are three important points I want to bring up with respect to this bit of trivia.

The first is a topic for another post: software developers are not typical users. Generally when developers write software, they're limited by their own immense understanding of how computers work and, more importantly, how they should be used to maximize productivity. Developers are usually very strict with respect to the files on their hard disks. The result of this is we don't generally need to search our files often, because we already know where they are (at least this is the case with me — I hope I'm not overgeneralizing).

Which brings me to the second major point I wanted to discuss: you are disorganized (assuming you are a typical user). You don't really have a naming convention for your files and your directories are all over the place. You don't have backups, you don't have redundant hardware. Why should you? The computer exists to help you, not to make you change how you do things to suit it.

If you're a typical user and you lose a file, you don't know where it is. You don't know what it's called. You just know that it had the word "finance" on the first page and that you made it in Microsoft Word. Luckily, your trusty search index has already noted this about the file you want, so when you type in "finance" into your desktop search application, the file pops up almost immediately.

Typical users shouldn't need to know where their files are stored, or even what they're called. A user need only know just enough information to uniquely identify that specific file. This should be obvious. I'm going to call this Spock's second observation: users organize files by high-level things like what a file is for (i.e. finance) rather than where it is stored.

Now, forget everything that I mentioned above while I take you aside for a trip to analogystan. Turn on your imagination and picture in your mind a bizarro world in which menus are written completely differently than they are in our universe. You turn on Bizarro Microsoft Word and look at the menu. Across the top are the categories:

Jeff Mike Mitch Betty Ben

You want to copy some text, so you select some text, then click on Ben (since Ben wrote the copy functionality) to open Ben's menu, and select copy to copy it. Then you move your cursor to some other place in your document. You want to paste the text you copied, so you click on Jeff (since Jeff wrote the paste functionality) to open Jeff's menu, then select paste to insert the text into the document.

You're a typical user from the bizarro universe, so this seems normal to you.

But wait, no. That's insane! Why would anyone use software that's organized that way? Just like how No one would use Word if it were always the same size, no one would use Word if its menus were organized by developer, because you'd never be able to remember where all of the useful functions are.

Good thing we don't organize software like that in the real universe, right?

Wrong.

If you're a Windows user, take a look at your Start menu's programs list, or open up "C:\Program Files". Unless you're anal about what ends up in your programs list, you're going to see a large number of software vendors. I have only been running this install of Vista for about a month now, and already I can verify there are six directories there that are just the vendor names. I'm not counting the ones that list both the name of the vendor and the name of the software.

Think about that. These vendors control what their program directories are called. They choose to name them in direct defiance of Spock's second observation. Users don't care who wrote their software. In fact, this information is so unimportant that users can't even find the software these vendors wrote without the aid of a search engine. This is why Vista incorporates a search textbox directly in the freaking start menu. Just to find programs! Programs that may be fantastic but were organized in a self-defeating way by their vain authors. Sacrificing usability for a tiny fraction of marketing real estate.

This brings me to my third point: it's often not the users' fault that they're disorganized. They need search because the software they want to use has taken steps specifically to make itself hard to find. I don't care how useful the software is, how easy it is to use — if users can't even find it without having to search for it then it has failed.

Comment on this post (12 comments so far)

Latest comments:

Rich B by Dupe (2009-02-19 13:46:22)

@Dupe by voyager (2009-10-07 13:31:29)

Re: what voyager said by Dean (2009-10-07 18:07:24)