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The Users We'll Never See
design, information, society & sociology, usability
June 03, 2003, 05:10 PM
About an hour ago, I felt a need to feed my Chipwich addiction, so I invited Kerry to go to Entropy with me. On the way back, she needed to stop by the Hub to get some registration and class scheduling issues worked out. Since I had nothing imminently pressing to do, I waited for her.
While sitting in the Hub waiting area, surrounded by brochures, magazines, important-looking forms, computers, and the various other trappings of a functioning administrative center, I started to reflect on how much information was out there in the world, and how much of it had to be dealt with. That's the thing about information; it always seems to need processing and organizing and analyzing and basically loads and loads of attention. Information can be rather childish in that sense.
I was reminded of Herb Simon's quote: "In the future, the scarce resource will be human attention". I reflected for a bit about how right he was.
But wait a minute, a little voice in my head remarked. Exactly how right was he? Sure the information-overload problem is a big deal for people at CMU, and probably is for information workers everywhere. But is everyone like us?
My father owns a house in rural West Virginia (Monroe County, for those of you familiar with the area). Life's quite different out there. People aren't so busy, for one thing; they don't appear to be so bothered by all this information. The information is there; there are construction projects and farm vehicles and weather patterns and plant DNA (scads of information lies in the DNA of even a simple organism) and who knows what else. But this information doesn't seem to be so concerned with getting your attention. It could care less about being processed.
My point is not that this "simple" life is ideal or perfect; it isn't. My point is not even that it's better; "better" is a matter of opinion and generally doesn't mean much in any absolute sense. Hell, I happen to like city life; I wouldn't move to the country if I was given a million bucks to do it. Rather, my point is that old Herb was not thinking about these people when he made up that quote. And how could he? He was here at CMU, where everyone is information-overloaded. Of course he saw the future in those terms; he was extrapolating from the present, just as any rational person would.
As human beings, our conceptions of the world and its problems are necessarily a product of where we are situated in society, both physically and status-wise, and who we choose to associate with. Dan Sieworek, Scott Hudson, and many other researchers here at CMU, are taking Herb's quote seriously with projects like Aura and Situationally-Appropriate Interaction to try to solve this information-attention problem of the future. But whose problem is this, really? It's their own problem, ultimately, and the problem of the people they associate with and the people who fund them.
As user-centered designers, we can only design based on our conceptions of the world. We can only perceive and design for the slice of reality we find ourselves in, and for most of us, this slice is quite limited.
Around this point, I was interrupted from my meditations by the secretaries loud discussion about whether picture files are supposed to end in ".jpg" or ".jpeg". They spent a good five minutes trying to figure out the correct answer (of course, both extensions will work fine for most modern programs). I smiled. File extensions are one of those known usability problems that no one can get seem to rid of. Usability advocates routinely complain about how design decisions such as this one are made by programmers who don't understand the mentality of the users they are designing for. But in the large scale, in the "redesign society" sense that researchers and the upper echelons of industry and government confront daily, does anyone really know who they are designing for? Does even the most skilled user-centered designer have any meaningful grasp on who the users are when the user base includes the population of entire countries (or the entire planet)? In this scenario, even we user-centered designers may be no better than the archetypal isolated programmer in a cubical we so frequently revile.
Sometimes I wonder if at least a subset of the designers of the world need to step out of their bounds sometimes. Some of us should go out into the world to observe the people whose lifestyles and values clash with the ones we are familiar with. Perhaps this would help us get a larger view of the world we are so eager to change, essential if we are to do more good than harm.
This idea has some background in design research; last semester we read a paper from DIS 2000 that advocated designing for "extreme characters" as an exercise to help break out of the mould of the existing interface design frameworks. But this is just a thought experiment; the extreme characters described in the paper are (by admission) caricatures of real people. A designer can't truly know what the elements of society outside his spheres of experience are like without seeing them for himself.
Now if we really were able to see the people of the world, the "end-users" of our world-changing visions, as who they are, and not just who we assume them to be, well, how mind-blowing would that be?