It's hard to believe, but parents admonished their children with the words "Nobody ever said that life would be easy" long before the advent of computers. That little aphorism just seems so perfectly suited to the IT age.
You know how it goes. Your employer foists some unexpected and unwanted piece of new software or hardware on you. After hours of hopelessly trying to muddle through, but getting nowhere, you finally admit defeat and turn to the last resort of those who imagine themselves to be computer literate: the users' manual. Despite still more hours of poring through this enormous tome, you are little further ahead than when you started. Why is it that so many user manuals seem to be written by people who are exceptionally fluent in five languages--C, C+, C++, C#, and Java--but have trouble putting together an intelligible English sentence more complex than "Where's my pizza, dude?"
Finding no refuge in the manual, you confront your boss and demand the funds necessary to take a course on how to make sense of the new technology. After five days of intensive, hands-on training, you finally learn how to get the product to do what you used to be able to do in five minutes without it.
If you find this happening to you again in the future and you need a laugh to alleviate the frustration before you put your fist through a wall, try this: Read the product's marketing literature. I'll bet you anything that it's sprinkled liberally with phrases like "easy to use" and "intuitive user interface."
The only people in the whole world who honestly think that this stuff really is intuitive are the ones who developed it in the first place. For the rest of us, it's like journeying deep into a foreign, bizarre, and unilingual land without knowing a single word of the native language.
Do you imagine that this happens just with complex enterprise software? Think again. Think back to the release of the first popular version of Windows, Windows 3.0. (And, think about this: How bad were versions 1 and 2 if the first version that most people remember ever having existed is 3.0?)
Microsoft spent millions of marketing dollars to tout how easy Windows 3.0 was to use. Shortly after it hit the market, I was in a bookstore and spied row after row of books that bore titles along the lines of Windows Made Easy. I spent hours laughing uproariously about seeing that sight after suffering a shock-and-awe bombardment of the Windows ease-of-use marketing messages. All right, I'm easily amused, but you get my point. Any piece of software that spawns a large, profitable industry dedicated to pumping out books explaining how to use the software does not deserve to be labeled as intuitive or easy-to-use.
I know that I'm a little behind the times here. Now, we can call up online help rather than read massive printed texts. What's more, that help is "context-sensitive" so that, wherever we are in the software, calling up a help screen tells us about just the feature that we are trying futilely to use. Thankfully, with context-sensitive help, we no longer have to wade through a mountain of irrelevant text to find information on the feature currently mocking us on the screen. This is a giant leap forward. The only problem is that if I had the faintest idea how to navigate through the system to get to the feature that I wanted to use or had the slightest clue that the feature even existed, I might not need help in the first place.
What really gets me is online help that includes a section offering help on how to use the help system. Online help for online help reminds me of an old book, The Devil's DP Dictionary by Stanley Kelly-Bootle. (For the benefit of those of you under 40, IT used to be called Data Processing, hence DP. That was just before it was called Information Systems or IS.) The Devil's DP Dictionary defines "endless loop" as "see LOOP, ENDLESS." I'll leave the definition of "LOOP, ENDLESS" to your imagination. Online help? See "HELP, ONLINE."
As someone who makes much of his living by writing, I am often tempted to leave all of this technical complexity and lack of ease-of-use and intuitiveness behind. I could just go back to using pen, paper, and snail mail. Unfortunately, that would mean that I and others would have to be able to read my handwriting. No user manual in this galaxy or the next could offer any help for deciphering that code.
Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, and president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact him at
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