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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

This is nerd crack: enjoyable and reinforcing, but not necessarily deep. Its recommendations seem, prima facie, to be limited to a small subset of the population. Is "giving up in frustration" measured? What about "fuck it, I have better things to do"? I'll agree that experts are better off with a command line, but I don't think the conclusions can be extended to the population at large.

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On the other hand, there are so many people who rely on "easy" interfaces every day whose productivity could be increased dramatically by learning the tools just a bit better. Think of how many people hunt-and-peck on their keyboards. Some of these people have been hunting and pecking for twenty, thirty or more years of typing every day (I work in a school---it's embarrassing to watch so many teachers do this day in and day out). You don't always have to become a "guru" to get something significant out of having put in a little effort learning your tools.

True; some people haven't even learned to use search/replace properly, let alone macros in their word processing tool. Some tasks they spent hours or days on could be done in a few minutes, given just a little bit knowledge.

Then again. Does Joe Sixpack benefit from being more productive? After all, usually they aren't paid more when they do more work, so there isn't that much incentive...

Most people don't have their performance or efficiency being monitored or have any internal/external motivation to improve that efficiency.

That's one of the things I enjoy most as a programmer is having the tools to easily monitor my output (LOC per day or something) but also the power to improve or create better tools.

I agree. In particular I found the tool on this page very useful: http://cspangled.blogspot.com/2010/05/staying-efficient.html

> Then again. Does Joe Sixpack benefit from being more productive? After all, usually they aren't paid more when they do more work, so there isn't that much incentive...

My initial reaction to this was: of course! Doesn't everyone benefit from spending less time doing repetitive, thoughtless tasks at work? (even if they don't use the extra time to produce more output for their employer?) But you're right: the evidence is pretty overwhelming that either this isn't true, or it's true but most people don't care or realize it.

Your comment makes me think of how short-sighted laziness is endemic or maybe engrained on a cultural level. Or even worse, it's a natural part of our decision-making processes, but I really think culture can overcome it.

Solving the problem of people never learning "one thing" to save hundreds of wasted hours over the years is akin to solving the obesity problem in America. Everybody that is obese knows already that obesity is a health problem, but it takes that little bit of effort to start making it pay off, and nobody has the time/desire to put in that little bit of effort. Meanwhile massive societal forces conspire to both make people overeat and stay inactive, just as they keep them from taking the time to learn new things about their software and work processes.

The reason I think culture and education can overcome these forces is because of another comparable societal problem: the campaign to end smoking actually has gotten a large percentage of Americans, especially youth, to get over that hump or even better never start at all. It took massive investment in public education and time for it to propagate through a generation. So, these are cultural problems: we have a failure to motivate people to explore new computer skills.

Is there any research about the keyboard issue? Sometimes I suspect that it is simply impossible for adults to learn touch-typing naturally the same way I did as a child (ie, simply by telling myself 'don't look at the keyboard'). Or maybe it's that they never engage in the activities that really force people to become fast typists (in my case, probably IRC) and perhaps never will.

I only learned to touch-type in my late twenties. It took my about two weeks of practising with gtypist for 20-30 minutes a day. I only type about 50-60wpm when I push myself (usually quite less), but even if you can only type 30wpm it's still an enormous improvement over hunt-and-pecking. It makes me cringe to think they're "teaching" MSOffice to school kids but can't be bothered to teach them basic typing skills.

I don't think the solution to this is to make hunt and peck typing impossible, whether by removing the labels on the keys, making the keyboard invisible, or what have you. People won't learn touch typing as a result, most will instead just not use the tool at all, instead of using it sub optimally. "Gee, my life would be a lot better if I tried this e-mail thing instead of calling people all the time. Oh, it's too hard for me to type, because I can't hunt and peck?" Give up

Which is why it should be taught in school. It took me two weeks to learn to type in my late twenties. It's not like you'd ever forget the skill--or have the opportunity to forget with all the homework that needs to be done.

not necessarily deep - It directly challenges a very widespread thesis, explicitly laid out in the UI manuals of Apple and Sun, of how to present information in GUIs. The work shows how following this advice can suggest non-optimal problem-solving strategies.

The recommendations in the papers aren't, contrary to what the blog post says, about CLI vs. GUI, but about what kind of information should be presented to the user.

I get to be in the position to observe the fragments of the 'larger parts' of the population during their interactions with the machine. They copy and paste for hours, editing files line by line replacing a character by another. Maybe it's just me and my background, but I immediately feel en prise by the waste of precious human minds.

And: If they these people have the endurance to stand countless hours of such repetitive tasks, they are more than able to take the challenges of steep learning curves.

That said: My approach always has been to try to teach people about some fundamentals instead of letting them walk calmly into their ui abysses. And usually, when people learn that you can do with a keystroke what took four clicks before, they want to know more.

They might not be able to take the learning curve, doing something repetitive gives a steady stream of feeling-of-accomplishment.

I hate excel for this reason. So many research colleagues do such horribly repetitive things when processing their data it makes me weep. The problem is they're not lazy enough to learn R, Stata, python etc...

I think the take away from this isn't that all user interfaces should be one way or another, but simply that things that are "tools", things that are meant to be used day in and day out for productive tasks, could benefit by increasing their learning curve at the cost of intuitivity.

Right, if you are to learn to use a tool in novel ways you need to understand its behavior at a basic level: it is better to experiment with it from the outside until you understand its "Tao".

On the other hand if you need to achieve a task whose outcome you won't rely on to reach other ends, like say buying airline tickets (ha), its probably better if you can offload the thinking to some other entity.

Totally agree. I didn't read the paper, but I doubt they have modeled the fact that people have a finite amount of time that they can invest in internalising stuff. IOW, (I presume) they have not looked at the opportunity cost of internalising UI details, and often that time is better invested in other pursuits.

In fact they did. They measured total task time for internalized versus externalized conditions. Contra your prediction, there wasn't a significant difference. Keep in mind this is one limited experiment so it's obviously not the final say, but it's always good to actually look at the data.

Thanks, you're quite right. Having now skimmed the paper "Does an interface with less assistance provoke more thoughtful behavior?", I would say that the measures of how many moves were made or remade, and how long was taken before the first move, are basically irrelevant, as the only quantities of genuine interest are how long the solution takes, and how well the subjects did on the questions afterwards. As you say, there was no significant difference in average solution time -- even though the low-NFC group did on average 19s better on the externalised version. Nor was there a statistically significant difference in either of the question types (although one type was close to favouring the internalised approach at p = 0.06). Maybe the other papers are more persuasive.

Just to clarify: are we talking about "learning the interface" plus "accomplishing task" here, or just "accomplishing task"? I'm pretty sure that e.g. unzipping your first archive with WinZip can be done more quickly than untarring your first archive with tar...

Both people had to learn to use an interface for scheduling speakers on a calendar GUI. Roughly speaking, in the externalized condition, more problem constraints were identifiable through visual feedback, while these were absent and had to be inferred in the internalized condition.

So, (in this paper), we're talking about planning versus relying on more external visual cues. Your WinZip versus tar example is apt, but it also introduces the issue of GUI versus CLI, which isn't addressed by the paper.

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