Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
11:24 - For the Rest of Us	(top)
Further to my rant earlier on filename extensions-- there's one thing I must make clear. That is that I really don't care about my own user experience. What I care about is what the rest of the world has to put up with. Frankly, I could care less whether my files have extensions on them or not. Hell, I made UNIX serve as my main desktop machine for like two years. I can put up with a lot, and I frequently do purely out of geekiness. But you know-- it's all well and good to banter back and forth about operating system advancements that let power users streamline their procedures. But it's quite another thing to have to watch the 85% of the computing world who have less of a clue about how their computer works than your average geek can fathom having, and see them subjected to the bewilderment that comes from a bare, out-of-the-box Windows installation and the brain-dead design traps that are built in. Like I said earlier: Microsoft software is designed by geeks, for geeks. The engineers often can't conceive of the mindset that they'd have to be in in order to write software that the average person can use efficiently and as designed. I myself can't get into that mindset unless I try; but when I do, it's horrifying. To take the example of my fan-art site: yes, I could (and did) automate the server-side processes to be very intelligent and account for as much user error as possible. But that's not where the problem lies. The problem is that people don't READ anything. They upload BMPs, and the system tells them that it only accepts GIF and JPEG-- and so hey, they change the filename extension, think they've converted the file to get around my pointless and onerous constraint, and upload it again. And it doesn't work, and then they e-mail me, and I have to explain to them a) why BMPs are not allowed, and b) why changing the extension does not convert the file. Automation does not help prevent the petulant e-mails. Automation doesn't stop me from having to explain, patiently, to at least four or five people every week, how to work with files in an extensions-based environment, without screaming my lungs out at them over how stupid Windows is and why it's responsible for their lack of understanding. Sure, we understand how to set up an "Open with..." contextual option for opening that .pdf file in Notepad. But what about Joe Average User? Like I said in the post about the RealOne player download page, there is apparently so much confusion among users over the "security warning" dialog box that Real has had to put up that screenshot explaining how to bypass it; evidently, enough people have trouble figuring that out that Real has had to field enough phone calls and e-mails to warrant taking this stupefying step. It takes some thought to realize just what that means. So much of this trouble could have been alleviated by software that was designed by people who know how to get inside the heads of average users-- which is what Apple hires for, rather than for the ability to hack the DoD. User-centric design is far more important to Apple-- and oddly, or perhaps not, that's exactly why many geeks shun Apple. They don't want to feel pandered to. They don't want to feel like they're being written for in a bloc with a bunch of newbies. They want to feel as though they're riding a mustang they've tamed themselves, instead of driving a car that someone else built according to focus group feedback. What's especially galling is that NTFS, the Windows NT filesystem, has had the capability for multi-forked files, just like the Mac OS, for years now. (They called them "Streams".) If you had the right tools, you could create as many named streams as you wanted for your individual files-- custom per-file icons, per-file app binding, comments, labels, anything you wanted. But Microsoft never completed the OS support for such features. After eight years, what we have is an OS where they've put all their effort into letting savvy users infinitely customize their pop-up menus and Favorites lists and so on, but they've never addressed the basic functionality enhancements that they already had the foundations for, that could have drastically reduced the drudgery and lack of control that casual (non-geek) users have in Windows. Why didn't they? I'm at a loss. Maybe it was backwards compatibility (though that's not an issue, the way it's implemented). Maybe it was security concerns. Maybe it was rank stupidity. Or maybe it was just that Microsoft's philosophy toward user-centric design is one of utter contempt. It takes a lot of effort to think like common users. I just happen to have a lot more respect for that kind of thinking than a lot of geeks do-- and a lot more vitriol for the lack of such thought. Because when so many people are affected by it, it amounts to mass user abuse.