GUIs, cars, metaphors (Score 1)

Imagine a world populated by people who live in farms, or in a nomadic tribe somewhere. The most advanced form of transportation is the horse.

Now you come up with this invention called a "car" and want to sell it, or just persuade all your friends that they should use it. What would you do?

Obviously, you'll outfit the car with bridle, reins and saddle, and a mechanical whip instead of the gas pedal.

Then you'd tell all your friends: "just ride it like a horse! It's easy! You don't have to know how it works, the car looks and feels just like a horse, so off you go!"

Gasoline would be made to look like oats, or whatever it is that horses eat. So every once in a while you'll just stop by a gas station to "feed" your horse.

Obviously, this is not how cars work. A horse is a shitty metaphor for a car because it is a) possibly dangerous and b) probably dumb in the long run.

a) Unlike oats, gasoline explodes if you're not careful --and it may kill you if you try to drink it instead of "feeding" it to your "horse". You think it's clearly a win, but the dangers of gasoline perhaps need to be dealt with. (There are no lawyers in this primitive world but there are tribal vendettas, which are almost as unpleasant).

So you add a well trained monkey, that comes with every car. The idea is, this creature will remain hidden unless you try to put some gas in your mouth, and which point the monkey jumps right in front of your face and says: "are you sure? oats are for horses! not for people!".

Having gone through the trouble of training the monkey it's hard to resist the temptation to add value to the user experience by teaching the monkey to do other helpful things at random times, which thinking leads directly to the dancing-paperclip-from-hell-that-won't-go-away-no- matter-what which is going to drive you completely insane, unless you happen to like monkeys --which of course some people do.

b) By treating the car as a horse, the user remains ignorant of important stuff like gas being toxic; and also ignorant of the car's full potential b/c a car can do things that no horse can.

And as intuitive as the car may be to us 21st-century western folk, its interface (ignition switch, gas and brake pedals and so on) is far from intuitive to a horse-only person. All of us who "just want to drive" have had to learn how to do it; and despite claims to the contrary the modern desktop GUI also has to be learned and taught.

Trying to deny that there is a learning curve with GUIs leads to more and more bloat (wizards, assistants, dialog boxes and whatnot --lots of monkeys). Worse, it seems to persuade even sensible people that everything the computer does should be understandable without mental effort. As a sysadmin, I've been amazed at seeing many users, highly intelligent and successful people, go through a personality change of sorts the minute they have a problem with their computer and become infantile and almost helpless in dealing with the machine. In my experience, the fancy GUI liberates the user for mundane tasks. For interesting or slightly more difficult ones the user tends to become more, not less, dependent on other people to show them how the computer works.

I don't mean to condemn "the GUI" in general, but certainly the current desktop environments --all of them-- try so hard to be intuitive that they end of being even more complex and overloaded.

As a wise old BOFH said: the only intuitive interface is the nipple. It's all learned behavior after that.