This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Dmitry Dvoinikov.
Original Post: Sympathy for Mr. Software
Feed Title: Things That Require Further Thinking
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThingsThatRequireFurtherThinking
Feed Description: Once your species has evolved language, and you have learned language, [...] and you have something to say, [...] it doesn't take much time, energy and effort to say it. The hard part of course is having something interesting to say.
-- Geoffrey Miller
No software does what the user is supposed to be doing, because that is not known to the user in the first place. Should that have become known, the person could have been replaced with a machine. Instead, software helps people by making small and routine parts of their jobs easier to do. Even that it does imperfectly.
The users constantly struggle to make the software do what they want, the way they want. Sometimes they find the features useful the way they are. Sometimes they adapt to their quirks. Sometimes they find ways around. And sometimes they dump the whole thing.
As such, software is a dumb servant. A very dumb one. It needs assistance by itself.
To be useful, software needs assistance from the user. There must be a way for the user to explain what he wants even though the software may not have this capacity.
But then, returning to the dumb servant metaphor, the user must be willing to help. Therefore, here is my point - the software should be appealing to the user's sympathy or even pity. The user should be empathically connected to the software. To help and not to throw it away should be its first reaction.
I don't have any recipes on how to build such software. Arousing human's sympathy can be difficult even for another human, not for a piece of software. The only answer that I have is that the user should like the software for what seems to be nothing in particular.
The way I see it now, software should be written in such way that the user likes it for no apparent reason from the first sight. If it's pretty and it behaves consistently and it doesn't jump in your face and it knows when to speak and when to shut up and it looks familiar and it looks novel and it has square buttons and it has round buttons, then perhaps the user likes it. But you never know.
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