What Do You Mean? I'm Not Doing Busy Wrong - DBR 051
Episode 51
What do you mean? I don't think I'm doing busy wrong. I don't really get this one directly, but it's a consistent subtext when I talk to folks, and it's not that I misunderstand. For years, I thought I wasn’t swinging a golf club wrong, but I think maybe people take it a little bit too personally, let’s think about why this might be so. The cultural idea: One's ability to use technology in the modern age is really unfortunately connected to efficacy as a human being, and the culture is such that we buy that notion. The thinking here is an outgrowth of the learning experiences that I've had as an adult We’ll talk about three interrelated areas: personal productivity, knowledge work, and work from home The tech (for various reasons) doesn’t support our learning.
- Evidence: Software, the industry and the software marketing business
- Evidence: usability is hard and the economics don't drive companies there
- Financial motivations in the software industry
- The whole software business is built around solving a problem that every human being has, and so you're going to be able to sell a billion copies of it. And that makes you rich, right?
- if you sell it to two people, you lose – that’s not the business model
- Two ways:
- Build a piece of software that does everything right, solves a problem so big that everyone needs it. This is very, very hard.
- Market to people and make them believe your software does everything, and you don't want to constrain them by telling them how to use your software
- Software builders are trying to be everything to everybody.
- Somebody has to teach you that's not what hammers are for, that's not what screws are for.
- Back to "intuitive"
- Marketing has managed to equate intuition with your intelligence. And more likely: intuition is related to your experience.
- the new one better look a whole lot like the old in order for my intuition/experience to be employed.
“Intuitive” is a weird word. It moves the responsibility to the user.
- There's nothing intuitive about it
- "Intuitive" is really kind of a strange word.
- It snuck in there and all these implications that are not, not really true.
Software Marketing
- Spin it such that, if it wasn't intuitive for you, then it's not our fault, it’s yours.
- People simply don't design things for usability – they simply claim that they do
- So not only do we start off with bad metaphors, but those metaphors tend to persist.
- The email metaphor is terrible
- Evidence: The envelope metaphor for email Fascinating: the interfaces haven't changed.
DBR – basically information management
- Password management as information management
- I asked a cybersecurity class – overwhelming majority don’t use good password management
- Do you understand what a password manager does? It's okay to say no, it does not make you stupid. Can you learn about this stuff? Yeah. Do you have time? Probably not.
- The “password = key” metaphor is wrong
- Imagine if you couldn’t keep a physical copy of your car key but that's a metaphor for passwords Password questions
- Do you understand the challenge of managing passwords? Have you been taught?
- Well, why not – it’s hard and our metaphors are wrong
- Data (electronic information) storage
- This is a hard problem that hasn’t been solved
- Were you taught how to use email?
- It’s complicated and we’ve not really figured it out
- Have you been trained in the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Work from home?