1/4/26
User is a dirty word in UX circles.
Author doesn’t want that. Don’t make the computer invisible. Don’t make the user invisible. Users should know they’re using a computer.
Let me refer to another guru of user centered design, Alan Cooper. In 2007, when the U word was still allowed in interaction design circles, he and his colleagues shared their secret in “About Face, The Essentials of Interaction Design”:
“As an interaction designer, it’s best to imagine that users – especially — beginners — are simultaneously very intelligent and very busy.”13
It is very kind advice (and one of the most reasonable books on interface design, btw) and can be translated roughly as “hey, front end developers, don’t assume that your users are more stupid than you, they are just busy.” But it is more than this. What the second part of this quote gets to so importantly is that Users are people who are very busy with something else.
Author doesn’t like the progressive erasure of the computer and the user.
For instance, in 2007, when Adobe, the software company who’s products are dominating the so called “creative industries”, introduced version 3 of Creative Suite, they filmed graphic artists, video makers and others talking about the advantages of this new software package. In particular interesting was one video of a web designer (or an actress in the role of a web designer): she enthusiastically demonstrated what her new Dream Weaver could do, and that in the end “I have more time to do what I like most — being creative”. The message from Adobe is clear. The less you think about source code, scripts, links and the web itself, the more creative you are as a web designer. What a lie. I liked to show it to fresh design students as an example of misunderstanding the core of the profession.
ASIDE:
- This site is really nicely constructed. I like the thoughtful placement of the side notes. The typography is nice. I like the occasional image placement.
In the book “Program or be Programmed”, Douglas Rushkoff describes similar phenomena:
[…] We see actual coding as some boring chore, a working class skill like bricklaying, which may as well be outsourced to some poor nation while our kids play and even design video games. We look at developing the plots and characters for a game as the interesting part, and the programming as the rote task better offloaded to people somewhere else.17
Rushkoff states that code writing is not seen as a creative activity, but the same applies to engagement with the computer in general. It is not seen as a creative task or as “mature thought”.
This is pretty interesting.
In a titled “The coming war on general computation” by Cory Doctrow.
- he says to make a computer into the locked down appliance that Don Norman calls for you have to lock it down
- you take the general computation machine and lock it down in such a way that the user cannot install their own applications or kill the processes that they choose to
- An appliance is not a stripped down computer. It is a locked down computer.
This is interesting. I think maybe the gist of this for me is:
- locking down a computer does not make it truer to its nature as a design
- locking it down just hides parts of the machine from the user
- presumably a more pure “good” solution would in some way allow access to these underlying details if needed
Today the rewiring aspect doesn’t have to be emphasized, but the idea itself that a single computer can do everything is essential, and that it is the same general purpose computer behind “everything” from dumb terminals to super computers.
The works of Lessig, Zittrain and Doctorow do a great job of explaining why both computer and network architectures are neither historic accidents nor “what technology wants”. The stupid network and the general purpose computer were conscious design decisions.
For Norman, further generations of hardware and software designers and their invisible users dealing with General Purpose technology is both accident and obstacle. For the rest of us the rise and use of General Purpose Technology is the core of New media
The dumbness and general purpose-ness of computers and networks is an intentional design feature. We should defend that.
The General Purpose User
General Purpose Users can write an article in their e-mail client, layout their business card in Excel and shave in front of a web cam.
They can also find a way to publish photos online without flickr, tweet without twitter, like without facebook, make a black frame around pictures without instagram, remove a black frame from an instagram picture and even wake up at 7:00 without a “wake up at 7:00” app.
Maybe these Users could more accurately be called Universal Users or Turing Complete Users, as a reference to the Universal Machine, also known as Universal Turing Machine — Alan Turing’s conception of a computer that can solve any logical task given enough time and memory.
This user is not a super user or a hacker. But they will use the machine they have to accomplish the task they are setting out to accomplish. They don’t necessarily need a specific application designed for their task.
e.g.
You can have two Twitter accounts and log in to one in Firefox, and the other in Chrome. This is how I do it and it doesn’t matter why I prefer to manage it this way. Maybe I don’t know that an app for managing multiple accounts exists, maybe I knew but didn’t like it, or maybe I’m too lazy to install it. Whatever, I found a way. And you will do as well.
We don’t need to try not to make “perfect apps”.
We should consider that users will be using our apps in this soup of accomplishing their tasks and try to leave them open ended as tools.
There is nothing one user can do, that another can’t given enough time and respect. Computer Users are Turing Complete.
Thoughts
- Software should be designed so that users can accomplish whatever goals they have
- We shouldn’t impose artificial constraints
- I’m reminded of “tools not rules” from the Sea of Thieves dev talk - create systems that interact richly instead of scripting specific experiences
- How does your software situate itself in the users’ larger tasks and goals?
- Perhaps we should not sand off edges on software but create tools that are deep and let you do anything once you’ve onboarded
- Perhaps we shouldn’t over-emphasize “intuitiveness”
- Perhaps the cleanliness of “good design” is something we should question
- Also - this article is a reaction to “ux clean design” which is itself a reaction to general computing… Both perspectives probably have a point. I think there’s likely a great use case to make for intuitive Norman-esque experiences.
- I like the pairing of the two. Create simple intuitive applications that you can escape from and stitch together when you want/need more complexity…
- I think I have re-invented the UNIX philosophy
- This also reminds me of a tool like IFTTT