[FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

glen ☣ gepropella at gmail.com
Thu Jun 15 14:40:48 EDT 2017


On 06/15/2017 11:23 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> But as for consumers of some product like Shazam, I can't imagine that most have any interest at all in how or why it works. 

Excellent!  I keep finding nits to pick. 8^)  Again, I'm not so sure.  I had a difficult conversation today with Renee'.  She normally doesn't take her phone to work because cell phones aren't allowed outside the locker room and the battery just drains away hunting for signal anyway.  But today she had to find a way to record a video (I assume for school).  She knows the phone can do it because I've done it.  But she didn't know how to go from stills to video.  I tried "Swipe to the right."  But that didn't work because she thinks "Swipe to the right" means move your finger to the right.  I meant move your finger to the left so that you can see what's on the right side of the 3D object being rendered.  In my weirdly configured head, I'm manipulating the thing behind the interface, not my finger ... so I swipe the image to the right by moving my finger to the left.  I'm certain my language is wrong, but whatever.  We could make the same argument for things like Twitter or Slack.  What is that icon?  What does it do?  Etc.  Of course, people like me just click and see what happens ... swipe this way, that way, bang it on the ground, whatever it takes to make the thing do something interesting.  People like Renee' _want_ to know what they're supposed to do.  And in that, they want to learn just enough about how/why it works so that they can know what they can do and how they can do it.

Anyhoo ... I suppose I could have simply said: interfaces aren't as operationally closed as we like to assume.


-- 
☣ glen


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