TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

System Failure

Preface: I need to get this one out of my Drafts folder before I resume the positivity. I wrote it a while ago, at my parents’ place, in such a fury that I barely remember typing a word of it. To break up its somewhat critical tone, I have inserted some of my Eve Online screenshots. Here goes:

My Gran knows a lot about wood-working. She likes wood, she likes working with wood, and she likes things made of wood. My friend Steve knows a lot about bikes. He likes riding bikes, he likes tinkering with them, and he even seems to like trying to explain to an idiot like me which one I should buy.

I know a lot about computers. I hate computers.

I’m part of one of the first generations to grow up with them – we’ve had at least one in the house as far back as I have memories, and I’ve had my own from secondary school onwards. So I’ve sort of hacked away at the most maddening idiocies that would normally get in the way of the things I use them for, but I still don’t think a forty-eight hour period has gone by without one of them making me swear, and I’m extremely difficult to anger.

The problem is that they don’t occur naturally, they have to be built. And they have to be built by people who are very intelligent in precisely the way that typically only people who are hopeless at understanding people are. Then they have to be used by people.

It’s incredible that there’s even such a topic as ‘usability’, laughable that it’s a relatively new one, and embarrassing that we haven’t actually done anything in it yet. Things like iPods are still seen as examples of it, which makes this era a lot like the one when fire was considered technology.

Linked computers are the single most important non-medical advancement mankind has made since the wheel, which I’m increasingly of the opinion was a mistake (except perhaps for bikes, which have broadly seen a net benefit), and we haven’t got round to figuring out how to make them usable yet? Usable. As in, so peope can use them. What have we been doing?

\i tend to notice what’s most heinousy wrong with computers when \i have to use someone ese’s to show them how to do something. \the pacement, for exampe, of the forwards sash key on a \toshiba \sateite \pro\; precisey where the shift key is on every other computer in the word. \or the fact that the ” key barey works on this particuar machine.

I was trying to make BBC website’s radio work on my mum’s, this, laptop. I fixed the first problem in three seconds – the volume was set to zero – but it’s four hours later now and I still haven’t actually managed the broader task.

And it’s worth saying that no-one ever tells you those concentric ellipses next to the clock represent a speaker rather than the Death Star (which they much more closely resemble) and that they summon no, not the speaker volume (that would almost make sense (spit!)) but the Windows volume, which is a range of meta-volume sliders that govern and multiply with all other volume settings, of which there can be up to five nested levels at any given time, sometimes in geometric and other times exponential proportion, and that they produce two different interfaces for these meta-volume sliders depending on whether they were single- or double-clicked, meaning that attempting to activate the double (which appears in a conventional window format) frequently creates an instance of the mini-interface triggered by the single (which manifests itself in a narrow, windowless overlay that steals focus but is not recognised by the operating system or Start Bar as an application, and presents the user with no obvious way of dismissing it, and which frequently encounters an unhandled exception that means it can’t be dismissed), sometimes followed by a second instance, sometimes moving to follow the cursor as it clicks again, sometimes actually blocking the second click, and jumping the volume to zero in doing so – quite often (and in this case) the very misconfiguration you are attempting to reverse.

When I said that was worth saying, of course, I had imagined I would be able to do so in fewer than a thousand words and four-hundred overlapping nested clauses.

Clicking the Listen Now link from the homepage of a BBC programme launches a new window which immediately notes that you do not have the RealPlayer plugin installed, which I took to be a compliment – the Windows equivalent of saying “Oh, you’ve lost weight!” or “So you finally realised puffer jackets weren’t even cool seventeen years ago?”

Mostly, I admit, out of disbelief. RealPlayer went out of fashion on websites to the extent that fascism did in Germany, some time before puffer jackets outlived their fad. Five years before their invention.

But this was not my own computer, and I thought there would be no harm in installing a small plugin which I happen to hate. I committed the very fallacy that is responsible for the ridiculous state of all computer software today – I thought something would be ‘good enough for normal people’.

If I were King God of Earthtopia, supporting RealPlayer would be a criminal offense. The punishment for requiring it would be watching your children die. So discovering that my technical savvy wasn’t actually up to the task of installing it, I couldn’t entirely suppress a noise that cause my mum to immediately ask what was wrong.

“There’s a picture of the download link.”

A picture. The BBC whisk you to their Help page, which is really a FAQ, rather than pointing you to the plugin, and then when you finally find the question that relates to the problem they already know you’re having, it has no link to the piece of software you need. Instead, it offers you an installation guide, the first step of which is to install the software. To illustrate how you do this, they show you a picture of the download button that you will find four pages later, just after step – and please excuse the large font you have by now already seen coming – FOURTEEN.

The picture is not a link. It is a picture of a link. It is a picture of a link you must click to complete step one, but which you cannot click until you have skipped steps 1-13, at which point it takes you away from the guide entirely. Nevermind why, how, in all conscience, there can be a FOURTEEN step process to install what PC World Magazine rated number two in their worst 25 technology products in the history of human civilization, in order to listen to the fucking RADIO; something people have been doing since before the FIRST WORLD WAR.

No! Actually, do mind that. Mind exactly that. Mind it furiously, because putting up with this shit is exactly the reason we have to put up with this shit.

Here’s the reason this matters: if you’re responsible for a feature of a site which, over your site’s lifetime, causes five million visitors five minutes of frustration, you are responsible for a lifetime of pain. That’s not a figure of speech, I actually worked it out – that’s seventy years of torment. If I were in charge of a team making a website, I’d have the designers watch the user tests with their hands splayed out on a table, and every time someone so much as frowned, I’d smash one of their fingers with a claw hammer six times. There’s no maths behind that figure, that one just feels right.

I didn’t read it, I skipped to the download link for the thing I didn’t want, it downloaded, I ran it over Internet Explorer 7’s apoplectic objection to me running a file I deliberately downloaded (to be fair, on this occasion it had a point), and it ran the RealPlayer downloader. This is an application consisting of a single blank horizontal progress bar that never progresses, a pause button that doesn’t do anything, and a mysterious ‘down’ button that depresses slightly when clicked. By flatly and categorically not working even a little bit, without explanation, it proves itself far superior to the program it’s trying to download. A Real program that doesn’t do anything is a relief on the scale of a cancer that doesn’t do anything – the word is not ‘malfunctioning’, it’s ‘benign’.

It’s not good enough for ordinary people, because ordinary people is everyone. Developers assume, when so few people seem able to intuitively understand their products, that people are stupid. In response, they hide the advanced features in future versions, insert big, colourful images, constant pop-up windows that try to explain what’s happening, and extensive help files. And of course, even fewer people understand this newer version, because hiding complexity adds a whole new layer of complexity.

Since DOS, computers have been getting harder to use. If you use XP, the easiest way to work with it is to also install Google Desktop, and use its quicksearch function to just type in the name of the thing you want to open or run, and press enter. Even if you’re an ordinary person. My gran can type ‘calculator’ more quickly than she could locate and click on it in the Start Menu. I can type Firefox faster than I can click on its quicklaunch icon.

Writing the name of the thing you want is dramatically quicker, more logical and easier to do than stroking the narrow slats of a clickless location-sensitive nested lateral hierarchy of hundreds of wildly diverse items that are categorised not by function, not by type, not even by name, but alphabetically by the name of the company that published them – not even the one that made them.

A search box is the low-water mark against which all interfaces should be judged, because it’s a complete lack of interface. And yet so far, we’ve yet to come up with anything more efficient or self-explanatory. It’s actually quicker for me to find something on the internet by typing it into the Firefox address bar (which Googles it) than it is to get back to it again via my bookmarks.

Windows Vista makes an almost sane gesture by adding a search box, but again it’s a step back: slower, harder to get to, harder to select a result from and limited to certain folders. Right now the only people even breaking even on an interface front are Google, who don’t even make operating systems, just by adding in the crudest and most basic possible interface concept into the OS they know we all have to put up with. It’s only by comparison to the excruciating insanity of modern interface design that it seems like an actual achievement, and it’s virtually the only thing we’ve got that just about qualifies as usable. Everything else is a fucking disgrace.