Years ago, some time before the dot com crash, I went to a western saddle & tack conference in Denver to sell a web-based catalog service. Why we thought it was a brilliant idea to sell web services to a bunch of farmers… well, that’s another story.
Anyway, around the second day a man—he ran a feed store, and looked to be in his sixties—got up the courage to visit our booth. He’d circled a few times, so I knew he was interested, but perhaps afraid of the “new-fangled” technology that we were demoing with.
After delivering my pitch, I invited him to pick up the mouse and try it out.
“Here, just point and click,” I said.
He picked up the mouse and—to my utter surprise—held it in front of the screen. Of course, what happened when he clicked the button wasn’t at all what he was expecting.
At the time, I couldn’t believe how lacking he was in basic computer literacy. After all, I lived in a world where mice were common things to have lying about the house. It’s taken me years of paying attention to user interface design to realize that what he did was not something to laugh at—it was exactly the right thing to do.
People shouldn’t adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. It is this reason that slate computers have a better form factor for general computing. It’s not “new fangled”, it’s “old fangled”.
In the last few days I’ve gathered some anecdotal evidence to support this statement. What’s the best way to find out if something is intuitively usable? That’s right, give it to someone who’s never used it before.
If you’ve read my last post, you know that I’ve been waiting for a Motion LE1600 slate computer to arrive. Well, it’s finally here, a week late. Over this Thanksgiving holiday, I tested my hypothesis.
Anecdotal evidence #1: From the Mouths of Babes
If you pay close attention, you can hear Maychelle ask: “can you touch the marker?” I think she wanted to smudge it with her finger. I had to tell her no, but I kept thinking to myself that I should be able to answer “yes”.
Think about it: all you’d need is an adaptive multi-touch sensor. In this case, you’d also have to pester Autodesk to upgrade SketchBook Pro.
Total training time: 30 seconds.
Anecdotal evidence #2: Comfy Patriarch
This is a photograph of my father reading the New York Times using their new reader software. I think he actually growled when I wrestled it away from him.
Total training time: None. I just handed it to him.
Anecdotal evidence #3: Mischievous Canine
Pomeranians are well known to be intelligent dogs, so I thought, why not?
She wasn’t able to manipulate the software on the tablet, most likely due to a lack of opposable thumbs to grip the stylus. Because this alone is not indicative of a failure to interact with the slate form factor (just the stylus), I have included it here.
I will likely repeat the experiment when the aforementioned adaptive multi-touch sensor becomes widely available.
Total training time: about 2 months. She can now sit and sorta lay down, but good luck trying to make her roll over.
Of course, I’m cheating a bit here. The software used by my experiment’s human contingent were designed with slate computers in mind (and thus are wonderful examples of how pen-based software should work). Other software, including Windows XP and Outlook 2003, are nowhere near as slate friendly. However I am reservedly hopeful that this situation will improve.
Perhaps one day I’ll be able to remember the incident at the saddle & tack conference in the same way my boss remembers her “rat tail” cell phone being too big for her pocket: as a possibility thankfully buried in the past.
I’ve now been using Windows XP Tablet Edition long enough to form some useful opinions. Next time, I’ll go over why I think Microsoft is going in the wrong direction with their TIP interface, and discuss the tools I have discovered so far to increase productivity with a slate computer.
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