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How To Be Dumb

Now that Alan Cooper's personas have become famous, one of the most prominent and well-known goals for user interface designers is not to make the user look stupid. This goal isn't really new because we all know of situations where we or someone else looked horribly stupid when trying to do something on a computer. Even the smartest women and men can look stupid at a computer if they don't know which button to click, menu command to call, or key to press - defenseless and exposed to the laughter and ridicule of other, less knowledgeable people. I came across so many people who did not dare touch a computer in my presence, either because they feared destroying something on the computer or afraid they would look stupid. As this problem is a really big issue for computer users, one of the most prominent and noble research areas for usability people should be to investigate how computers can avoid making people look stupid.

Figure 1: Like so many other personas, Gerhard - my personal persona - does not want to look stupid when working at the computer



Computers are Intransparent
In the early days, computers were totally intransparent: there were just some switches and light bulbs at the computer's front panel that served for the communication with the "knowledgeable." From time to time, the computers spit out a punched tape, which again required some machine to decode it. (The "experts," however, could even decode the tape just by looking at it.) Later, computers printed out some more or less cryptic characters, and even later, the user communicated with the computer via keyboard, monitor and mouse - that's the state we have today. But however sophisticated these devices are, we still look into the computers' inner workings through a "peephole" called a monitor.

Do we really understand what state the computer is in, which commands it expects and what its cryptic error and system "messages" mean? No - computers often still leave us in the dark about what...