Re: GUI designs, accessibility and navigability

In article <1iymw11.l777pn1yjtojhN%real-not-anti-spam-address@apple-
juice.co.uk>, real-not-anti-spam-address@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...

Sam Nelson <sam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On the contrary. It has opened computing to people who could never enjoy
learning to use the command line. It is probably, since the steering
wheel displaced the tiller in cars, the most successful user interaction
device of all time.

It's resulted in an awful lot of people that think they have a clue how
computers work, when actually they haven't. At least back in command-
line days you actually had to know something to get anything done.
What, I wonder, is the 5yo kid going to do when his latest rabbit
picture _doesn't_ make it to his granny? He isn't going to stand a
chance. But then, computers never fail, do they?

How is that different from one's fridge, dimmer switch, central heating
or television?

THey all come with immediate feedback, and therefore matter much less.
If Granny doesn't get the latest rabbit picture, it suggests something
went wrong, but you don't know what, or when, and you don't know what
the implications of whatever went wrong are. Of course, you don't find
out right away, because Granny doesn't (necessarily) report that she
didn't get the latest picture---she'd have to have known it was coming,
and been sufficiently bothered about its non-arrival to report it, to
do that. If there _is_ an error message, it doesn't make sense unless
you have context. Given that apparently-sensible adults will just
click OK to error messages, what chance does the computer stand, in
front of a 5yo kid?

And why does it matter?

Because there could be an implication that something more important
will fail later. Kid acquires no mental model of the process, and
therefore no understanding, and therefore no way of reasoning about it,
should it fail. A friend who ran a supply depot for a branch of the
armed forces had to take aside one of his underlings who had got into
serious financial trouble, and the underling couldn't understand how
this had happened `because I still have loads of cheques left in my
chequebook'. That's what happens when a mental model fails you.
--
SAm.
.

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