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Sophie-Tech X: Intuition and Learning - How the UI Changes the Game Fundamentally and Why Anachronisms are Sometimes Better
It's been a while since the last Sophie-Tech post. Here's a short review. With the birth of my daughter in 2007 came an opportunity to observe a new human interfacing with technology that didn't exist when I was in her position. By observing her approaches to and successes with technology, I am able to infer quite a lot - both good and bad - about the technology, especially the UI.
Today the focus is on the UI as represented by the lowly touch tone keypad, versus the lowly - and anachronistic - pulse telephone. I was recently surprised to learn that Sophie is able to dial the telephone. This isn't the dialing she did a couple years ago, when she called 9-1-1 on my Blackberry, but truly a completed phone call. At the age of three. She dialed my wife's cell phone. She was supervised by her older sister in the task, but it was just to watch her do it. She has since demonstrated it all by herself.
This is not about cleverness on the part of a kid, but is about the alteration of a time-honored interface that hones in on different and more powerful properties than were had by the previous interface. The old rotary dial phone was based on the principle of turning a wheel and thus generating a certain known number of clicks that could be translated into a route. You had to be careful when doing it, because to make it work there had to be a hard point that would stop the rotation of the dial, and if you were in a hurry you could bruise your finger on the post. If you didn't turn it all the way to the post, then though you started to dial a seven, you could turn it into a six, just by stopping the rotation early. This was what passed for great fun when I was a kid; that and dialing up the time and temperature number.
The touch tone interface changed all that, though. You could not turn a seven into a six, and you did not have to worry about injuring your finger when spinning the dial. Instead of being based on the art of counting pulses, it became about the art of recognizing tones. There was a degree of skill involved in dialing the phone, now there is not. You remember a pattern of numbers, and then you touch a series of pads with those numbers on them.
This is all so simple even a kid can do it. Really. All they need to know is a sequence of information and they can translate that sequence directly into a connection. No mechanical knowledge or skill is required. This isn't about being a guy in his 40's all of a sudden complaining about things - that never comes to anything anyway, so why bother - but it is about the design of newer interfaces, and the surprising limiting effects that technological development can make.
What would you say if I made the statement that the Steampunk movement is actually a good example of how the UI can be done differently? Does an anachronistic appearance automatically mean that a technology is not as good as another? This has really bothered me in the past, because I have seen decisions made around, of all things, the appearance of a UI. This is the actualization of the Dilbert comic strip where the pointy-haired boss wants a background color of mauve because mauve has more RAM.
The truth of the matter is that the touch tone enables the entire telephone network to run - hang with me, kids - as part of the internet. The ways that signals are sent have been merged into the ONE WAY (capitalized to foreshadow the Matrix-esque nature). Your telephone signal is very likely working off of a technology called VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol (yes, the same IP from when your tech guy asks you to give him the IP address for your computer, and you tell him it's a Dell... will the scars never heal?), and that technology works only with the beeps. The pulses need not apply.
It isn't even that we need pulses, except... there is a problem that can exist in times when the power is not so available. If you are using VOIP and the power goes out, then it is likely your phone will. Remember how in olden days your telephone received its power from the low-voltage feed present in the wire? Since the switch has been converted to use optical transmission - the fiber optics that basically go from the phone company to the room where your router is installed - you can understand that you can't have light going through all the time, ready to power your equipment should you need to make a phone call. So, the power of the phone is only there when the power of the house is as well.
I know, that problem is solved by having a cell phone. That is true... at least just as true as if you go to a Colts game and the stadium is packed and Manning throws such an incredible pass that 50,000 people have enough bandwidth through their phones to post the picture they just took of the pass to Facebook. Try that out before you decide how true it is. I did at the Bengals game last year, and let's just say the hamsters running the switching equipment at the phone company were working through their breaks!
So what is the point? The point is that in our quest to take the anachronistic out and replace it with the smoothly-digital, gray slider-bar, cookie-cutter graphics, stole-this-Flash-animation-from-another-site world, we sometimes take a step backwards, a step illustrated by the contrast between the ability to dial a number, and the ability to understand what is happening. Truthfully, my daughter also dials her pretend phone and has conversations, so the relative difference between her play and her true ability to place a call is nil. The bar has been lowered, sacrificing some reliability.
Here is a short list of some anachronistic things I think we could all learn from, and possibly resurrect:
1) The rheostat. This is basically a control to determine the level of sound, or electrical function, or whatever is being controlled, that is allowed to pass. Think about the volume control. I recently had to adjust the slider control for my speakers, then the volume control for my video player, just to be able to clearly hear the sound. That is because in the effort to engineer digital controls into everything, there have been multiple controls placed into the same application, and both are required. A simple rheostat that controls the physical volume of the speakers does the trick without having to make multiple adjustments using multiple similar, but maddeningly different in a few key areas, interfaces.
2) The physical connection. No, really. It struck me today that, though the technology has improved greatly, with every leap forward in 'technology', we sacrifice a little QoS - quality of service. I use Skype on a daily basis, and I experience signal problems there which would never be experienced with a physical connection (I realize there is a plug at a couple steps in the process, however 1) you don't have a dedicated circuit, just a logical one and 2) you use radio technology if you're using wireless access, so signal degradation is as close as the nearest electrical device. First there is a problem with the video feeds - annoying, but understandable, and certainly something that I'd expect with a physical connection as well, because of the slower nature of the data transfer; then comes the call killer - audio difficulties. If the video feeds are shut off, then the quality of the call should be at least as good as it used to be when a call came in on copper, through copper switches. If we cannot fix the quality of our calls to be at least as good as they were when we used copper - I won't get into the strangeness that is present when trying to understand how a signal sent using electricity can be clearer than one sent using light, the purest substance we have - can we truly say that we have accomplished anything other than adding to the capacity to transmit data? This is the digital equivalent of putting 500 people in steerage and heading out on a trans-Atlantic voyage, versus putting 100 people in cabins and making more trips.
3) The chalkboard. We moved to the dry erase world a while ago, but there is a problem. When you are solving a problem, you first have to decide which colors to use for which pieces of the puzzle, then you have to find markers that work - does it bother anyone else that people who are supposed to write thousands of lines of code that will be used to issue payrolls don't have the pre-requisite skill it takes to close the cap on a marker?! How good is their code if their coloring skills are suspect? Out of the lines = code.Fail, my Moutain Dew besotten comrade!. Then you have to make sure the markers aren't permanent. Then you have to find the eraser. When you have a chalkboard, you have one color that you use, and a freeform experience. You don't worry about colors, or about anything else other than working on your problem. And erasers are optional - anything can be an eraser, and it comes out in the wash.
4) The CD. WAIT! CD's aren't dead yet! Maybe not, but MP3's have put a serious hurt on them. I equate this one to taking my kids to one of Emeril Lagasse's restaurants a couple years ago. Serious coin was dropped for some of the greatest food on Earth. I savored each bite, wringing every bit of flavor and texture out of the dish, enjoying it in a way that would make the chef feel good about the craft. My kids devoured everything with the same gusto and speed they do a Big Mac, so the details didn't make a bit of difference to them. A $40 duck entree and a Big Mac being placed at the same level?! The same is true of the music stored on a CD, versus that from an MP3. The MP3 produces a digitized, COMPRESSED version of the music. It squeezes the same music into a tighter space than a regular audio file. When you squeeze audio, you lose some of it. It happens. The average of 3 and 5 is 4. The average of 4 and 4 is... 4. When I try to uncompress those numbers, how do I know which are 3's, which are 5's and which are 4's? There are algorithms that can do it, sort of, but by the time you take out sampling loss, and compression loss, and, and, and, the music suffers. If you're not a fanatic about your music it doesn't make a difference, but I want to hear the bass line, and I want to hear the little things the keyboard player is doing, and unless I'm listening to some grunge, I don't want muddied-up sound.
There are many other things that could go into this list, but I think the point is made. With great technology comes great responsibility...great design and a dedication to using the best, not just the 'looks like everything else' should also follow.
It's been a while since the last Sophie-Tech post. Here's a short review. With the birth of my daughter in 2007 came an opportunity to observe a new human interfacing with technology that didn't exist when I was in her position. By observing her approaches to and successes with technology, I am able to infer quite a lot - both good and bad - about the technology, especially the UI.
Today the focus is on the UI as represented by the lowly touch tone keypad, versus the lowly - and anachronistic - pulse telephone. I was recently surprised to learn that Sophie is able to dial the telephone. This isn't the dialing she did a couple years ago, when she called 9-1-1 on my Blackberry, but truly a completed phone call. At the age of three. She dialed my wife's cell phone. She was supervised by her older sister in the task, but it was just to watch her do it. She has since demonstrated it all by herself.
This is not about cleverness on the part of a kid, but is about the alteration of a time-honored interface that hones in on different and more powerful properties than were had by the previous interface. The old rotary dial phone was based on the principle of turning a wheel and thus generating a certain known number of clicks that could be translated into a route. You had to be careful when doing it, because to make it work there had to be a hard point that would stop the rotation of the dial, and if you were in a hurry you could bruise your finger on the post. If you didn't turn it all the way to the post, then though you started to dial a seven, you could turn it into a six, just by stopping the rotation early. This was what passed for great fun when I was a kid; that and dialing up the time and temperature number.
The touch tone interface changed all that, though. You could not turn a seven into a six, and you did not have to worry about injuring your finger when spinning the dial. Instead of being based on the art of counting pulses, it became about the art of recognizing tones. There was a degree of skill involved in dialing the phone, now there is not. You remember a pattern of numbers, and then you touch a series of pads with those numbers on them.
This is all so simple even a kid can do it. Really. All they need to know is a sequence of information and they can translate that sequence directly into a connection. No mechanical knowledge or skill is required. This isn't about being a guy in his 40's all of a sudden complaining about things - that never comes to anything anyway, so why bother - but it is about the design of newer interfaces, and the surprising limiting effects that technological development can make.
What would you say if I made the statement that the Steampunk movement is actually a good example of how the UI can be done differently? Does an anachronistic appearance automatically mean that a technology is not as good as another? This has really bothered me in the past, because I have seen decisions made around, of all things, the appearance of a UI. This is the actualization of the Dilbert comic strip where the pointy-haired boss wants a background color of mauve because mauve has more RAM.
The truth of the matter is that the touch tone enables the entire telephone network to run - hang with me, kids - as part of the internet. The ways that signals are sent have been merged into the ONE WAY (capitalized to foreshadow the Matrix-esque nature). Your telephone signal is very likely working off of a technology called VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol (yes, the same IP from when your tech guy asks you to give him the IP address for your computer, and you tell him it's a Dell... will the scars never heal?), and that technology works only with the beeps. The pulses need not apply.
It isn't even that we need pulses, except... there is a problem that can exist in times when the power is not so available. If you are using VOIP and the power goes out, then it is likely your phone will. Remember how in olden days your telephone received its power from the low-voltage feed present in the wire? Since the switch has been converted to use optical transmission - the fiber optics that basically go from the phone company to the room where your router is installed - you can understand that you can't have light going through all the time, ready to power your equipment should you need to make a phone call. So, the power of the phone is only there when the power of the house is as well.
I know, that problem is solved by having a cell phone. That is true... at least just as true as if you go to a Colts game and the stadium is packed and Manning throws such an incredible pass that 50,000 people have enough bandwidth through their phones to post the picture they just took of the pass to Facebook. Try that out before you decide how true it is. I did at the Bengals game last year, and let's just say the hamsters running the switching equipment at the phone company were working through their breaks!
So what is the point? The point is that in our quest to take the anachronistic out and replace it with the smoothly-digital, gray slider-bar, cookie-cutter graphics, stole-this-Flash-animation-from-another-site world, we sometimes take a step backwards, a step illustrated by the contrast between the ability to dial a number, and the ability to understand what is happening. Truthfully, my daughter also dials her pretend phone and has conversations, so the relative difference between her play and her true ability to place a call is nil. The bar has been lowered, sacrificing some reliability.
Here is a short list of some anachronistic things I think we could all learn from, and possibly resurrect:
1) The rheostat. This is basically a control to determine the level of sound, or electrical function, or whatever is being controlled, that is allowed to pass. Think about the volume control. I recently had to adjust the slider control for my speakers, then the volume control for my video player, just to be able to clearly hear the sound. That is because in the effort to engineer digital controls into everything, there have been multiple controls placed into the same application, and both are required. A simple rheostat that controls the physical volume of the speakers does the trick without having to make multiple adjustments using multiple similar, but maddeningly different in a few key areas, interfaces.
2) The physical connection. No, really. It struck me today that, though the technology has improved greatly, with every leap forward in 'technology', we sacrifice a little QoS - quality of service. I use Skype on a daily basis, and I experience signal problems there which would never be experienced with a physical connection (I realize there is a plug at a couple steps in the process, however 1) you don't have a dedicated circuit, just a logical one and 2) you use radio technology if you're using wireless access, so signal degradation is as close as the nearest electrical device. First there is a problem with the video feeds - annoying, but understandable, and certainly something that I'd expect with a physical connection as well, because of the slower nature of the data transfer; then comes the call killer - audio difficulties. If the video feeds are shut off, then the quality of the call should be at least as good as it used to be when a call came in on copper, through copper switches. If we cannot fix the quality of our calls to be at least as good as they were when we used copper - I won't get into the strangeness that is present when trying to understand how a signal sent using electricity can be clearer than one sent using light, the purest substance we have - can we truly say that we have accomplished anything other than adding to the capacity to transmit data? This is the digital equivalent of putting 500 people in steerage and heading out on a trans-Atlantic voyage, versus putting 100 people in cabins and making more trips.
3) The chalkboard. We moved to the dry erase world a while ago, but there is a problem. When you are solving a problem, you first have to decide which colors to use for which pieces of the puzzle, then you have to find markers that work - does it bother anyone else that people who are supposed to write thousands of lines of code that will be used to issue payrolls don't have the pre-requisite skill it takes to close the cap on a marker?! How good is their code if their coloring skills are suspect? Out of the lines = code.Fail, my Moutain Dew besotten comrade!. Then you have to make sure the markers aren't permanent. Then you have to find the eraser. When you have a chalkboard, you have one color that you use, and a freeform experience. You don't worry about colors, or about anything else other than working on your problem. And erasers are optional - anything can be an eraser, and it comes out in the wash.
4) The CD. WAIT! CD's aren't dead yet! Maybe not, but MP3's have put a serious hurt on them. I equate this one to taking my kids to one of Emeril Lagasse's restaurants a couple years ago. Serious coin was dropped for some of the greatest food on Earth. I savored each bite, wringing every bit of flavor and texture out of the dish, enjoying it in a way that would make the chef feel good about the craft. My kids devoured everything with the same gusto and speed they do a Big Mac, so the details didn't make a bit of difference to them. A $40 duck entree and a Big Mac being placed at the same level?! The same is true of the music stored on a CD, versus that from an MP3. The MP3 produces a digitized, COMPRESSED version of the music. It squeezes the same music into a tighter space than a regular audio file. When you squeeze audio, you lose some of it. It happens. The average of 3 and 5 is 4. The average of 4 and 4 is... 4. When I try to uncompress those numbers, how do I know which are 3's, which are 5's and which are 4's? There are algorithms that can do it, sort of, but by the time you take out sampling loss, and compression loss, and, and, and, the music suffers. If you're not a fanatic about your music it doesn't make a difference, but I want to hear the bass line, and I want to hear the little things the keyboard player is doing, and unless I'm listening to some grunge, I don't want muddied-up sound.
There are many other things that could go into this list, but I think the point is made. With great technology comes great responsibility...great design and a dedication to using the best, not just the 'looks like everything else' should also follow.
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