Low Learning Curve

Posted in 25 April 2010 ¬ 05:23h.RickNo Comments »

In computers, why is "easy to use" the metric everyone cares about? I was listening to some Linux-inspired electro-industrial today at 5:50 AM on Jamendo (long story), and the vocal track started off with "I've found it a very very easy to use system."

Forget easy to use. No one gets into a Corvette or a Porsche and says "Oh yeah, this is so so easy to drive." Heck no. Those are cars that would shred a beginning driver. Good, because those cars are optimized to be awesome, not to conform to some idealized notion of "easy". But enough about cars.

Linux is optimized for power. As the man page for eshell says:

The role of a command shell is to give you more control over what

your computer does for you. Not everyone needs this amount of control,

and it does come at a cost: Learning the necessary script commands to

express what you want done… But if you find yourself using your

computer frequently enough, it is more than worthwhile in the long run.

Any tool you use often deserves the time spent learning to master it.

Emphasis mine. Optimizing for a beginner is a huge mistake, in my opinion. Sure, if you want to make a lot of money in this early stage of computer development, when adoption isn't very high yet, then it makes sense to optimize the entire experience for beginners. But in the long haul, we will develop a population of experienced users, not beginners. And once the average users has not years, but decades of experience with computers, shouldn't we admit that any tool you use that much deserves the time spent learning to master it? And, given that you are going to master a tool, it makes sense to choose a tool worthy of your time. That should be the analysis new users should be making, rather than seeing how much they can get done in the first 15 seconds using the system.

As the ironically defunct Ion Window Manager's author, Tuomo Valkonen, said (before leaving Linux and developing solely for Windows):

So-called “modern desktop environments” converge on total unusability, and present-day mainstream graphical user interfaces in general are far less usable than they are praised to be. Usability simply does not equal low learning curve, and hiding system details from the user, as the Official Truth seems to be these days.

He was right. It's too bad he left Linux to develop closed software for Windows.

via Rick’s Posterous