Evaluation

This week's reading put me in mind of the Steam content delivery system's fabled statistics gathering functionality.

Steam is a framework for buying, downloading, and playing various games. It is rumored that, behind the scenes, there is massive data collection in place, sending back reports of what players are doing in the games, presumably to help improve the experience. It's not talked about, but occasionally Valve, the company that makes Steam, will release an update that fixes something, citing their statistics gathering as the tip off that there was a problem.

I can only imagine this kind of information gathering becoming more and more useful, as computers are becoming pretty much always online, and software updates are being done automatically in the background. For Steam, since the data being collected is recreational, there are no real privacy concerns (presumably, they don't send back personally identifying information, though really, no one knows for sure,) but for other applications, this could be a problem.

However, with the right EULA and the right data retention policy, this risk could be mitigated.

On the other hand, speaking as a paranoid end user, I'm thankful for my outgoing firewall.

Overcomplexity

This week's reading put me in mind of a problem I've witnessed in the interfaces around me. That is that, in a quest for increased functionality, device or software designers will make the interface more complex than it needs to be. My parents recently bought a new microwave. On my last trip home, I wanted to boil some water for tea. However, I was stopped by a microwave with something like 18 buttons and a little digital display.

The old microwave had three control surfaces. A latch on the door allowed the whole system to be turned on or off by the very intuitive action of either putting food in or taking it out, a dial allowed for selecting a cooking time, and another dial allowed for selecting the cooking intensity.

Not the microwave I'm talking about

With the old microwave, my most basic interaction with the device (boiling water), was three steps:

1) Put the mug in and close the door, priming the system.
2) Check that the intensity is on "high," and if not set it to such.
3) Set the cooking time to three minutes by use of the dial.

If I was defrosting food, the procedure was:

1) Put the food in and close the door.
2) Check that the intensity is on "defrost," and if not set it to such.
3) Set the cooking time to the appropriate interval.

With only three control surfaces, and a largely stateless, analog machine, the procedure could never get longer than three steps.

Not the other microwave I'm talking about

However, with the new microwave, I still haven't figured out the intended procedure for boiling water. Presumably, there's a way to coax it into an "Enter time" mode, thus making use of the digit inputs, but the only way I've been able to do it is:

1) Put the food in and close the door.
2) Press the "clear" button until whatever is on the display is replaced with 00:00.
3) Press the "add minute" button until it's the desired cooking time rounded up to the minute.
4) Press "start."
5) Wait until the cooking time is up, if non-integer minutes are required.
6) Press the button to abort the cooking procedure.

The new machine has a number of features, like a "popcorn" button or a "defrost" feature. However, these functions were available in the old microwave, by use of the intensity dial. The new interface makes the rarest interaction as hard to perform as the most common one.

Photos of microwaves used under the Creative Commons license. Attributed to the persons to whose Flickr pages the images link.

The designers of the microwave either thought that the new interface would make the microwave easier to use or that buttons were more modern than dials. However, the old interface is much more intuitive. The same surfaces that are used as controls to set an input variable are the displays to show the status of the variable. The machine is stateless, so there's no different input modes to shuffle. When you approach the machine, you don't have to make sure what state it's in before you start inputing data.

This has caused me to become frustrated. I cannot say whether this is a general reaction to this microwave, as my parents seem fine with it, but my response was very negative.

Multitasking

I've heard a lot about multitasking in regards to the "internet generation." Supposedly, we're able to simultaneously attend to numerous information streams and interact with all of them competently. This is mentioned in the book in box 3.1, "Sliced Attention." I have personal experience with this. I've seen students in class on laptops, looking very much like they're taking notes, when really they're reading email or looking at Facebook.

I used to bring my computer to class, to take notes on. The potential benefits are very alluring. It's easy to think that being able to take notes and organize them using any of the numerous notetaking applications out there would make the whole lecture experience more effective. Not to mention being able to reference the class website, look up confusing topics for further clarification, and record the lecture for later review. However, in practice, it falls apart.

I can't count the number of times I would start the class attentive, find something to look up, and spend the rest of the lecture browsing Wikipedia (invariably finding a path to something entirely unrelated.) It's far too easy for the computer to turn from a tool to a distraction. I've not found a mystical ability to focus on two things at once. If I'm doing something else, my work on a primary task suffers greatly.

That's why I now bring only a notebook and a pen to class. The only computer I use in class is the one in my skull. Using laptop in class is certainly an idea whose time will come, but current implementations aren't sufficient and are actually detrimental, in my opinion. Without the internet and its wealth of distractions, there's nothing that a laptop can do that a notebook can't in this situation.

Solutions would have to incorporate either a different teaching style or a different notetaking method, or both. Obviously, in a more project-based environment, there would be a great use for computers. However, in your average 200 person undergraduate class, there's not a lot of opportunity for project work without overtaxing the TAs' grading muscles.

Reading

I almost forgot to write a blog about the reading for this week.

I enjoyed the first two chapters. One part that stood out to me was the comparison of the modern spreadsheet application to its original ancestor. I had never really thought about the history of spreadsheets. I was surprised however to see that it was pretty much fully developed on the first iteration. Looking at Excel, there is no feature that I use regularly that wasn't in VisiCalc. It's very impressive how an effective interface design has such incredible staying power. It could have been changed at any time, and there's intense selection pressure to do so. A more efficient or easy to use spreadsheet application would be very popular. However, even Apple's new Numbers application doesn't differ much from the form set out by VisiCalc's designers.