19.11.03 - Grandma Machines
I was thinking about the madness of the "Grandma Test" after reading this story about User Linux. For those who don't know, the Grandma Test is a (mostly) theoretical test usability engineers use when designing your programs. The gist of it is that the average grandma should be able to sit infront of the app and be able to use it without exploding either the computer or her fragile and senile brain.Now let me put that into perspective for you; it's like trying to design a nuclear reactor that a Neanderthal fire starter would find intuitive and easy to use. I'm not saying that your grandma is a neaderthal, I don't even know your grandma, though I'd like to get to know her. Is she hot?
Making things that are complicated easy to use can only end in either disaster or both. Maybe programmers are all evil goits hell bent on making your life miserable at the office by doing as bad a job as possible designing their programs even if it means risking their jobs, but there's a chance that that's not the case and you're just a retard. I know it would be wonderful if when you didn't know how to do something that thing could miraculously change to suit your stupidity level but that would also mean that the mentally retarded could soon be working in our power plants.
Call me insane, or handsome, or preferably insanely handsome, but when I don't know how to do something with machinery I read the manual that came with whatever it is I'm destroying (read: "fixing") that day. Well okay I mostly mess about with it until it's so broken that I'm forced to read the manual but that's because I'm male and being male is a handicap so you can't take the piss or anything. If God wanted grandmas to be able to operate computers then he'd have gotten into the heads of the programmers and made them choose between miraculously making computers not computers but magic boxes of love and the life of their first born (God loves tradition almost as much as I love blaspheme).
Now some people might say I'm being mean and cold hearted, but that's only because I am. But think about it, do you really want your grandma to be able to see what you've been looking at all night on the Internet when you were "doing that special report"? If computers were easy to use then I wouldn't be able to talk down to people when they phone me for technical support, and I don't want to live in a world like that.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to have to go through debugging the program myself everytime it accidentally deletes all my porn, but there has to be a balance here. The end-user needs to take some of the responsibility for operating the grands worth of machinery they just purchased. Allowing the user to do a certain level of things without understanding what they're doing is dangerous, and I'm being serious now. I accept that not everyone has the time or even wants to learn what is really going on with their machine when they perform complex tasks, but I've had enough calls telling me that a user can't get his mail and doesn't want to connect to the Internet to do so to know that ignorance is a life threatening matter (when you phone my tech support line).
In conclusion; you're grandma is a retard.
splinter "senility is a state of mind" khan