Let's Kill the Hard Disk Icon 613
Kellym writes "The desktop metaphor is under attack these days. Usability experts and computer scientists like Don Norman, David Gelernter and George Robertson have declared the metaphor "dead." The complexities blamed on the desktop metaphor are not the fault of the metaphor itself, but of its implementation in mainstream systems. The default hard disk icon is part of the desktop metaphor. And the icon is the cause of the complexity created by the desktop"
Named desktops (Score:5, Funny)
/complexity/ ?? (Score:5, Funny)
Why not.... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's do it! (Score:1, Funny)
rm -rf /dev/hd* /dev/sd*
rm -rf
Yippi!
Then there's the monitor size issue ! (Score:4, Funny)
Next time some random user needs "more room to store my stuff in the computer" he/she goes out and gets him/herself a larger monitor rather than a larger hard disk !!!
Oh nooooooo.... (Score:1, Funny)
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
Re:Yah right... (Score:5, Funny)
Same thing here. The hard disk is the physical place where my files reside. Simple enough.
Then, when I click File-Open in Word, the little man inside my computer takes the bus on Data Road to go get my report.doc file. I get it, no problem with that.
But before buying tickets, he checks in its drawer, and if a small part of the file happens to be there, he hands it to me before getting on the bus and bringing me back the whole thing. Efficient and fast, I get that.
But, the files aren't always accessible by bus. Sometimes, the little man has to ask his daughter Ether to get on her bike and go fetch my report.doc from the neighborhood. But she's been warned : she can't take the road until there's no more car in sight. If she ever get slammed on her way back, she must drop everything, get back to the little man's house and try again. I know, it's weird, but that's the way it works.
Thanks to my company's 3 hours intensive training, I know the ins and outs of my computer. I don't need no stinkin' abstraction. Let's deal with the real things.
- There, Ether. Take that to Slashdot.
What about Bob? (Score:2, Funny)
I've got it! A study! You've got books over here for your reference material, your desktop with pen and ink for writing a new document, a window (glass-window) for viewing the rest of the world with a webbrowser, a light switch for shutting down the system, a utility closet for the control panel items... add a little mousehole with a rat that offers some helpful advice...
Aw poop. This looks exactly like Microsoft Bob. Well, let's start small.
A guided tour of my new GUI (Score:2, Funny)
"Okay, we're booting up. As you can see, a door is slowly opening. Above it, it is labeled 'My Computer Place.' As you step in, you see a room full of filing cabinets, CD organizers, a sofa and loveseat in front of a TV, a washer/dryer set, and a small calico cat."
"Try clicking on the cat. Heh heh. It meowed. Heh heh, it meowed again. Oops, it exploded. The guys in Redmond have been playing too much Warcraft."
"Notice that you can see both a trashcan and a fireplace. Click and drag a file from the filing cabinet to the trashcan. Now click an drag it back. You've recovered the file, although it has a couple of spots of bacon grease on it now. Pretty cool, eh? Now click and drag that same file to the fireplace. Now try and drag it back. See? You can't! Oh, that wasn't something you were working on, was it? Fifty hours of work, you say? Well, then you're not likely to ever forget the difference between the two."
"Now let's take a look at that washer/dryer set. This is where your 'virtual persona' does his laundry. Your virtual persona is much like you, as he can go around the house making changes. He's working hard, watching your behavior in order to learn your preferences. See what he's learned already? He's dragging all your files over to the fireplace. Your VP looks like Bill Gates by default, but you can change that."
"You also have a virtual pet. Er, had, anyways. Don't worry, they're a pain to take care of, and you're probably better off without it."
"Now let's take a tour of the basement, shall we? The room over to your left full of boxes is where we store seldom-used files. If you want to access the contents of this room, just tell your VP to drag the boxes up to the living room and sort through them. The process takes about three hours, and elicits a torrent of verbal abuse from your VP."
"Over there you see the water heater. By examining this, you can see the status of. . . er, well, your water-cooled heat sink. If you have one. Otherwise, just ignore it."
"Finally, behind this door, you have a server farm which controls your access to the outside world. You can sit down, and, by pressing virtual 'keys,' you can issue ipchain commands for your firewall, ping other computers, and boot up virtual mail and web servers. I think the mail server is running an older version of Linux, so you may need to upgrade it to the latest kernel."
"Now, back upstairs. This is the door to your computer room. Under no circumstances should it ever be opened by anyone. It has to do with Godel's incompleteness theorem. If you open the door, the computer will try to model itself, including the fact that there is a virtual computer inside the model which it needs to model, and so on to infinity. Trust me, the RAM upgrade alone would bankrupt a small country."
Re:Yah right... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Where's some real work on this? (Score:5, Funny)
I nearly murdered the lecturers who tried to teach me on the HCI part of my degree course. While it's true that programmers usually design bad GUIs, the same is true of HCI researchers, except the other way round:
While a programmer will implement a bad gui because he just makes it so it can access the functions he wants, and figures that because he knows how to operate it- that's good enough, the HCI researchers will draw little diagrams, write up "task lists" and waffle on about the importance of various colours and auditary cues, being careful to cite some vaguelly relevant psychology papers and spend far too long being politically correct and work out how e.g. dead people will be able to use the menu on the mobile phone.
Finally they will "play test" their proposed user-interface on a random group of people who will swear blind in exchange for money that they have either a) never used a computer before or b) it was a mac. The play test might even consist of a paper-based simulation- leading to hilarious role-playing games:
luser: So next I think I would click on this here
HCI scum: With the left or the right mouse button?
luser: the middle one
HCI scum: ohhhh. interesting. roll a d20. Oh, the orc takes you by surprise.
luser: WTF?
HCI: exactly
luser: I kick the orc!
HCI: with the left or the right leg?
luser: the middle one.
The "play tests" of the gui (ignoring, as you should the above surreality) never yield interesting data because the researchers pay far too much attention to how individual users expected things to behave, even when they had no computer experience. The point is that computers that allow you to do more than a few simple things will always be semi-complicated by nature unless you dumb them down to the level of mobile phone/pvr menus- and then, as we all know it becomes frustrating to use them when you want to do something quickly, and impossible to do something complex or not envisioned by the manufacturer.
I mean, take for example that whole generation of people who refused to learn/couldn't set their vcrs to record one simple program. True- vcrs didn't need to be that complex- we now have electronic on-screen guides to programmes that make recording a doddle, but at that time the complexity was needed to keep the costs of the machine down and also technology was not as advanced.
However, there will always be some piece of kit that requires that same level of expertise that setting a vcr did, perhaps more, especially given that computers tend to be able to be used in a non-linear manner when compared to the simplistic menus of consumer multimedia devices.
People who can't accept the idiosynchrasies of the computer interface and learn to phase it out (exactly such things as a hard drive icon) will never be any good. Such people tend to learn a set way of doing things on the computer, so if you fuck with their desktop and move the icons about for example they end up madly clicking on an empty piece of desktop and sobbing uncontrolably when they realize nothing is happening.
The point is that if the hard drive icon needs to be changed because it's a confusing representation of how things are, then the users for whom this would be a problem have already lost.
I *DO* agree that we could do with another layer of abstraction though. For example, a user might have some mp3s he downloaded in the My Documents folder where IE defaulted to saving them- other mp3s in My Downloads, where X random download manager put them- and yet more in another directory from when he ripped a cd with some other app. It would of course be nice to be able to easilf list all mp3s on the computer, no matter where they are, as in this case, and indeed many others it is not relevant to the user where the files are- only to the programs and the os. (If you would normally create a "bad rips" directory to put certain mp3s in you now instead tag them with the meta data that they are bad rips...) Now, I know you can just use a file search to find all mp3s on the hard drive, but say you want to find all the mp3s longer than 5 minutes, or ones of just hip hop- some meta-data is needed to help you fine-tune your search criteria.
While it is true that some programs now, like Windows Media Player can "catalog" your files for you it is nowhere near as good as having a meta-filesystem built into the os.
The same meta-tags would be in all the files on the whole internet (tm) too- would make finding stuff a lot easier. I think TBL was going on about having more meta-tags for web pages and some clever system for stopping the obvious abuse of the system by vendors of unscrupulous pr0n.
Sorry for rambling on like some insane karma slut, and for the spelling, which is well below my normally fantastic level, but I am sitting here really tired, waiting for FFX to be released...
graspee