Sophie Tech 2 - It's About the User Interface

The alarm clock, the coffee maker, the key fob, the radio, the key sequence to wake up my PC (actually to log back in - apparently Microsquish took it upon themselves - AGAIN - to update my PC without asking first - there is another hour I'll never get back waiting for their faulty Outlook issues - if I were a believer in i ching, every time they did that I would know somewhere deep in my heart that someone in a former Eastern Bloc country or southern hemisphere neighborhood would produce enough pirated software to cost them a few million, and that it would be in line with the universal theory of equality - for now, all I know is that they couldn't code something right the first time out if you held a Linux to their head and threatened to replace all their bloatware with a functional OS... oh, wait!  Anyone seen the refusal of most developers to code to Vista?  The oncoming light is NOT the end of the tunnel, it IS a train, with a penguin as the engineer... but I digress) and now to enter this disrespectful, yet truthful, text - this whole day has been consumed with pushing buttons.  As an adult, I have gotten used to this and have begun to use buttons as tools, almost without thinking.  What does the user interface of today do for developing minds and technology?

Sophie is a very curious infant.  At the ripe age of eight months, she has begun to understand what buttons are and, more curiously, what they do.  She has even figured out which buttons will do which things, and will interface with them accordingly.  This equates to a level of access to technology that was unheard of just a couple of decades ago.

When the user interface was a string that had to be pulled out to cause something to happen, or some other mechanical device had to be employed in order to cause a toy to do what it was supposed to do, babies had a certain time of their developmental cycle when they would be able to interface with and use those technologies.  They had to meet minimum requirements in the areas of motor skills, fine muscle control and physical strength.  In other words, the body had to be able before even a mind that was willing could use the technology.  Those rules still apply, but to a far lesser degree now.  Instead of mostly being mechanical, the technology interfaces of today are electronic, with a much lesser amount of mechanical actuation.

I'm not one of those parents who thinks there is a super genius developing inside his daughter - she isn't nearly as clumsy as I expected she'd be, so she probably gets a little more from her mother than from me, in which case she will grow up to be a very smart lady - for I see her interact with these buttons and I really think other babies could be doing the same things.  She knows which button turns on the TV, she knows which of the buttons on a certain toy to touch in order to hear lullabies, as opposed to Old McDonald, and she seems to exercise choice over what she plays.  She even understands which button on my Blackberry to push to take a picture, and she knows which one gets us to the menu that allows the pictures to be reviewed.

This is not an accident, I think, but the natural consequence of some very good design.  When our interfaces were knobs that had to be twisted to varying degrees based on a little bit of skill plus some memory and interpretive function (remember trying to tune in a UHF station with the fine control that was nestled behind the channel selector?), or were 'all-in-one' controls where we had to memorize how many clicks did which thing, the learning curve for technology was steep, and thus inaccessible for the young.  Now the proper combinations of choice and ease of use has placed technological access into the hands of the super young.

John Adams once said that he studied war so his son could study Mathematics, and his son's son could study Art.  Following that logic, I suppose you could say that my father studied mechanical production efficiency and quality control (he retired from GM, where he was both on the line and certified as an internal ISO9000 auditor) so that I could study knowledge management, so that my kids could study proficient combination and synthesis of information to provide a better life for themselves, and hopefully their neighbors.  

It appears that this is off to a good start, because if Sophie can manipulate technological interfaces before she is a year old, how much longer in a fertile young mind can the ideas percolate to improve and advance these things?  How much more comfortable with a technologically-enhanced world will she be so that she doesn't need as much ramp-up time to have efficient use of it?  When I was born technology had to be sought out, and only when my physical self could support what my mental self wished to do.  Now technology greets babies when they are born, and sometimes before.  They are able to do what they wish to do with the technology, and if that doesn't speak volumes about the importance of user-centered design, then must thou hie forthwith to thine carriage, for thine Ordnung seeks thy safe return from amidst the English and yon infernal machines.  (It's not a Newton issue, but the prior comment infers that anyone who feels user-centered design is not important would feel far more comfortable in an Amish community.) 

In short - it's about the usability, techhie.  That's why, though I gripe about their methods and inefficiencies, my machines (save for two - one where I'm working with Ubuntu, and the other a Macintosh, which I'm actually blogging on right now, because after several failed attempts to get cookies to be enabled enough in IE 7 to allow me to even submit a post, I gave up and used this right from the start, because I had work to do) still run Windows.  Windows in its latent bloat and frustrating security update procedures still just does what I tell it to do about 80 percent of the time.  It's usable, but not efficient.  If Ubuntu can encroach on that 20 percent of what Windows can't do, then Pareto is dead, as Windows will at that point be also.  Then we'll have to turn our vicious attention to Debian.  I do wonder if the person who replaced the random key generator with something easier to use/crack was a former Microsoft coder.  Well, SOMEONE had to ask... maybe they were just a script-kiddie...