Last week, I joked that computers aren’t “macho” enough anymore. The user interface is friendly and forgiving rather than brutal, computers are small and make no sound anymore, and so on. Back then, you could hear the speed of your modem. You could tell that the computer was working hard because of the scratching of the drives and the blaring fans blowing hot air.
Behind the joke, there is this point that computers are not only super portables (cell phones), but also completely silent. Of course, there are still those massive servers that are noisy in those server rooms, but those are not in your house, let alone in your pocket. The whole visceral experience of using a computer is now almost completely gone.
Also, the ultra-politeness of user interfaces is starting to annoy me. When a user clearly makes a mistake rooted in idiocy, then the computer should just throw an error message rather than falsely implying that the cause of the problem is the computer’s. Conversely, maybe it is not too much for a software to assume the user has learned to use the software, especially those that require some level of conceptual complexity.
In a sense, by making computers so conversational and silent, we remove a learning method that works great for those that are the most likely to write the software of the future: Those that want to learn from their mistakes, by being forced into a formal communication with the computer rather than an “informal” one.
Published on November 4, 2012 at 19:23 EST
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