Another few hours invested in tech support for the parents, and it always inspires the same feeling: massive resentment.
Not at the parents, of course, who are lovely and patient and appreciative. No, at the stupid Microsoft-led home computer industry that still, 30 years in, hasn’t worked out how to make it easy to work with their material. Basic needs that have been iterated billions of times around the world – “my old computer isn’t working any more, how do I get all my material across to the new one I just bought?”, “I mistakenly allowed this program to launch automatically when I turn the computer on, how do I stop it?” – are frustratingly complex to resolve. Help systems are incomplete, assume too much, or are downright misleading. The desktop + files metaphor is a nightmare. (And lets not even mention the havoc unleashed by switching platforms.)
Illustrative point: two people are in a room together with their laptops, connected to the same wireless network, and they want to share files. It is several orders of magnitude simpler for them to sign up to Dropbox, using servers on the other side of the world, than to use the wireless hub they’re both ten feet away from.
This is boneheaded and wasteful in the extreme. Unfortunately, it’s what we’re stuck with. There is, apparently, no consumer imperative driving OS designers to build broader, more usable, more accessible forms. The consumer imperative is overwhelmingly for building higher: teetering sky towers of speed and prowess that offer only one narrow stairway up. (Honorable and notable exception: the iPad)
I’m not suggesting that building broader would be easy, mind you. Usability is hard. Distilling complex systems of interdependent logic into usable everyday tools is an enormous challenge. But, come on. We deserve better than this. We *need* better than this.
I just can’t figure out why there isn’t more focus on this. Surely all those designers are doing parental tech support too, right? Forget dollars – isn’t that motivation enough?