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private_messaging comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]
He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse. It's not that the networks conspired to dumb us down, and it's not that people want something exactly this dumb, but it's that those folks in control at the networks, much like Jobs himself, tend to make systematic errors such as believing themselves to be higher above the masses than is actually the case. Sometimes that helps to counter the invalid belief that people will really want to waste a lot of effort on your creation.
My parents are incapable of using the context menu in any way.
Jobs may have been on to something.
Forcing everyone to the lowest common denominator hardly counts as "onto something".
Fictional polemical evidence is not an argument; see my reply to private_messaging.
And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.
Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.
Yep. Respected and admired at a distance, certainly. But a lot of people who knew him personally tend to describe him as a manipulative jerk.
Which has little to do with how he & his simplifications were remembered by scores of millions of Americans. Don't you remember when he died, all the news coverage and blog posts and comments? It made me sick.
Meh, I thought of him as a brilliant but heavy-handed and condescending jerk long before I heard of his health problems. I refused to help my family and friends with iTunes (bad for my blood pressure) and anything Mac. My line was: if it "just works" for you, great, if not, you are SOL. Your iPod does not sync? Sorry, I don't want to hear about any device that does not allow straight file copying.
Heh. I have been known to engage in "What do you mean you are having problems? <blink> That's impossible, there's the Apple guarantee It Just Works (tm) (r) <blink> <blink>" :-D
Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)
Anyway, we seem to agree. One of the interesting things about Jobs was the distance between his private self and his public mask and public image.
I am too, but I pay attention to media coverage to understand what the general population thinks so I don't get too trapped in my high-tech high-IQ bubble and wind up saying deeply wrong things like private_messaging's claim that "Jobs's one-button mice failed so ordinary people really are smart!"
Yeah, that's so totally what I claimed. Not. My point is that a lot of people overestimate how much smarter they are than ordinary people, and so they think ordinary people a lot dumber than ordinary people really are.
Also, the networks operate under the assumption that less intelligent people are more influenced by advertising, and therefore, the content is not even geared at the average joe, but at the below-average joe.
Free free to elaborate how your one-button mouse example and all Jobs's other successes match what you are claiming here about Jobs being a person who underestimated ordinary people's intelligence. (If Jobs went broke underestimating ordinary people's intelligence, then may heaven send me a comparable bankruptcy as soon as possible.)
Did he say this, or are you inferring it from his having designed a one-button mouse?
Having two incorrect beliefs that counter each other (thinking that people want to spend time on your creation but are less intelligent than they actually are) could result in good designs, but so could making neither mistake. I'd expect any decent UI designer to understand that the user shouldn't need to pay attention to the design, and/or that users will sometimes be tired, impatient or distracted even if they're not stupid.
I recall reading that he tried 3 button mouse, didn't like it, said it was too complicated, and gone for an one button one. Further down the road they need the difficult-to-teach alternate-click functionality and implemented it with option-click rather than an extra button. Apple stuck with one button mouse until 2005 or so, when it jumped to 4 programmable buttons and a scrollball.
The inventor of the mouse and of many aspects of the user interface, Douglas Engelbart, gone for 3 buttons and is reported on wikipedia as stating he'd put 5 if he had enough space for the switches.
I can't find a citation, but the rationale I've heard is to make it easier to learn how to use a Macintosh (or a Lisa) by watching someone else use one.
I did dial-up tech support in 1999-2000. Lots of general consumers who'd just got on this "internet" thing and had no idea what they were doing. It was SO HARD to explain right-clicking to them. Steve Jobs was right: more than one mouse button confuses people.
What happened, however, is that Mosaic and Netscape were written for X11 and then for Windows. So the Web pretty much required a second mouse button. Eventually Apple gave up and went with it.
(The important thing about computers is that they are still stupid, too hard to use and don't work. I speak as a professional here.)
And for this we can be eternally grateful. While one button may be simple, two buttons is a whole heap more efficient. Or five buttons and some wheels.
I don't object to Steve Jobs (or rather those like him) making feature sparse products targeted to a lowest common denominator audience. I'm just glad there are alternatives to go with that are less rigidly condescending.
But did you deal with explaining option-clicking? The problem is that you get to see the customers who didn't get the press the right button on the mouse rather than the left. Its sort of like dealing with customer responses, you have, say, 1% failure rate but by feedback it looks like you have 50%..90% failure rate.
Then, of course, Apple also came up with these miracles of design such as double click (launch) vs slow double click (rename). And while the right-click is a matter of explanation - put your hand there so and so, press with your middle finger - the double clicking behaviour is a matter of learning a fine motor skill, i.e. older people have a lot of trouble.
edit: what percentage of people do you think could not get right clicking? And did you have to deal with one-button users who must option-click?
This was 1999, Mac OS9 as it was didn't really have option-clicking then.
I wouldn't estimate a percentage, but basically we had 10% Mac users and 2% of our calls came from said Mac users.
It is possible that in 2013 people have been beaten into understanding right-clicking ... but it strikes me as more likely those people are using phones and iPads instead. The kids may get taught right-clicking at school.
I remember classic Mac OS . One application could make everything fail due to lack of real process boundaries. It literally relied on how people are amazingly able to adapt to things like this and avoid doing what causes a crash (something which I notice a lot when I start using a new application), albeit not by deliberate design.
edit: ahh, it had ctrl-click back then: http://www.macwrite.com/beyond-basics/contextual-menus-mac-os-x (describes how ones in OS X differ from ones they had since OS 8)
Key quote:
What I like about 2 buttons is that it is discoverable. I.e. you go like, ohh, there's two buttons here, what will happen if I press the other one?
Now that you mention it, I remember discovering command-click menus in OS 9 and being surprised. (In some apps, particularly web browsers, they would also appear if you held the mouse button down.)
Most people didn't (and don't) understand the contextual difference and themes of interface to design a two-button mouse interface.
The current system is to throw design patterns against the wall and copy those that stick.