Change Conversations

Jan 23, 2012

Round about 2000, I stumbled across a software project that restored my will to live. The MAME project was developing software that made it possible to run old arcade and console games on any platform — in simple terms, I could download their free software and run old arcade games on my PC. I grew up on these games, and had been very saddened by their disappearance over the previous years.

Of course, as with most things, the situation wasn’t as simple as downloading and installing some software — for one thing, MAME provided the emulation software to make all this possible, but not the games themselves. Finding games (and games with proper licensing) proved to be a challenge. But by far the bigger challenge was with the physical interface between software and user.

Arcade games came equipped with a dizzying array of joysticks, buttons, and flywheels, and in many ways the games were designed with particular physical interfaces in mind. Try playing Tempest without a heavily weighted flywheel, and you’ll be sorely disappointed in the results.

Try playing Robotron with a keyboard instead of two joysticks, and you’ll be cursing at the computer screen in no time.

I speak from experience.

The solution — one I never undertook myself — is to build a control panel for your MAME emulator. If the computer keyboard and mouse don’t provide you with a good enough interface, build your own! Lots of people have done it. Check out this homemade rig:

The Right Interface

The lesson I take from this is simply that sometimes the right interface can, regardless of all of the wonderful features of a piece of software, hardware, or website, be the difference between a great user experience and a terrible user experience. While simple, I do believe that it is an oft-overlooked bit of wisdom.

Your website might hold the secrets to eternal life and happiness, but if users have to click more than two or three times to get to that information, your site will quickly be dead to them. If you’re building a new website, don’t rely on yourself to see if the paths to your information are good ones. Get people who aren’t familiar with the site to browse through it and see how they manage.

Your software might be the most useful programs in the world, but if it’s not also one of the most useable, you’ll have a difficult time selling copies of it. Again, good interface design and testing are paramount here.

Your hardware might do incredible things, but if no one can figure out how to use it, no one is going to buy it. Design and test!

Brilliant Interfaces I Have Known

iOS: Obviously, one of the great revolutionary interface schemes of the past decade or eight has been the operating system for the iPhone — iOS and its touch/swipe/tap interface. Scrolling by swiping, opening by tapping, selecting by touching, all has made the iPhone one of the great utilitarian and fun computer devices of all time.

Scrivener: Have you ever tried to use a word processing program to write a book? I have, and it’s not fun. Programs like Word and OpenOffice are good at handling one or two documents of a few pages each, but anything more and it’s an organizational nightmare. Luckily, I found Scrivener — an amazing piece of software that is built with the author and researcher in mind. It allows you to organize all of your research, drag and drop images from other sources, and provides you with a virtual corkboard that makes visualizing your project a breeze. When you’re done, you can export to Microsoft Word so that the poor suckers who don’t have Scrivener can see what you’ve done.

The Hand Blender: Tired of hauling out your huge, unwieldy blender, filling it with food, running it, and pouring it into a bowl? Break out your handy (literally) Cuisinart Hand Blender, and just bring the blender right to the bowl. Brilliant!

Oct 31, 2011

In the good old days, all software, even $20 games, came with printed manuals. I remember rolling my eyes whenever I opened a new PC game, and saw a small book inside — if you really needed a manual to play a game, you might be a little dense. (In fairness, there were always one or two games a year that were terrifically complicated and justified the glossy manuals that came with them.) But in general, software manuals were a welcome and often necessary part of any software package.

Fast forward to today.

I recently bought some terribly complex and terrifically not inexpensive software — a physical copy, in a real box (another vanishing trend) — and here is the sum total of documentation that it tells you about before and after installation:

• a PDF overview of how to install the software
• a message after installation that if I want any help, I should check out user videos and user forums

I did a little digging around, and it turns out that there’s actually a PDF manual buried deep in the file structure of the DVD on which the software came. I didn’t start reading it yet because, ironically, I spent all of last night putting together a cheap piece of furniture whose assemblage documentation consisted of four pages of images without any words. It worked for me until step 3, whereupon I almost borrowed my neighbor’s chainsaw in order to get two parts to fit together. (Note to the worried: I wound up getting the pieces together via a combination of contortions for which my body was not well suited, along with a flashlight, a rag, and a dense loaf of bread. Don’t ask.) In any event, I don’t hold out a great deal of hope for my new software’s PDF manual being any good, because clearly the manufacturer isn’t all that proud of it. And it makes me think that the trend of manual-less software is drawing close to its insidious all-inclusive adoption.

How Did We Get Here?

Why are manuals a thing of the past? For one thing, there’s the obvious expense of the things. It’s no cheap thing to print a 300-page, full-color, attractively set book. I recall a significant company in the 1990s experimenting with charging extra for their software’s manual, and the consumer backlash was swift and unkind. The company rolled back the extra charge, but, naturally, soon after raised the price of the software. (Surely just a coincidental price change.) Nowadays, software is generally so relatively inexpensive, and margins so tight, that raising prices to include “extra” niceties like printed manuals isn’t a great option for many companies.

Another factor is the fact that at some point in the late ’90s, third-party books became almost universally better than the software makers’ own manuals. And that makes sense, really. Software makers aren’t necessarily great writers, and are not in the book business. So when software users started using official manuals as doorstops and monitor heighteners, software companies started wondering why the hell they were bothering. Of course, the problem for the consumer is that we’re back to buying a manual, albeit from a third party. Also, book publishers caught on to this trend and started releasing a plethora of replacement manuals; naturally, a lot of them kind of sucked. Weeding out the good from the bad is a tall order, though Amazon.com’s user ratings helps out a great deal with this.

The Up Side

Maybe we’re just becoming a paperless society, as promised at the dawn of the computer revolution. The booming sales of Kindles and e-books certainly points to a paperless itch being scratched. There’s certainly an up side here, with a bunch of trees being spared.

There is another good thing perhaps contributing to the death of the manual: maybe in general software is getting better designed and easier to use, to the point where you don’t really need a manual most of the time. There were plenty of MS-DOS programs (yes, I’m that old) back in the day that were quite literally impossible to use without a manual, simply because the interfaces were so primitive. (Shift-Ctrl-W means “copy paragraph”? Really?)

But even with PDF manuals, online help systems, user forums, and tutorial videos, there’s still nothing quite as easy and comfortable as cracking open a big old paper book and tracking down an answer the old-fashioned way. Call me nostalgic.