The perfectly friendly interface is too often seen as the Holy Grail of online service designers. It’s the application, stupid! It doesn’t matter how cute the icons are in my spreadsheet software – I’m not going to use it to balance my checkbook … If the online industry is going to attract a lot of new users, we’re going to have to spend less time inventing new features and more time figuring out the answer to the fundamental question of defining something of value that people need and want … Perhaps the thing online services could do today to make the technology more user-friendly is hire a few less programmers and a lot more guides, teachers and facilitators to bridge the gap between the complex resources and people who currently find them arcane.
Predictor: Kimball, Lisa
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 article for The Wall Street Journal, Thomas E. Weber shares the words of many users and analysts of computer networks, including Lisa Kimball, a partner in Metasystems Design Group, an Arlington, Va., computer-applications consulting firm. Weber quotes Kimball saying: ”The perfectly friendly interface is too often seen as the Holy Grail of online service designers. It’s the application, stupid! It doesn’t matter how cute the icons are in my spreadsheet software – I’m not going to use it to balance my checkbook any more than I’ve tried to use the simple check register ‘technology’ my bank has been giving me for years. Balancing my checkbook isn’t something I’ve found necessary or useful to do. I haven’t run into many people who say, ‘I’d love to be looking up massive amounts of information in databases and follow a dozen special-interest newsgroups and see what the weather is in Boston at the moment, but, sigh, it’s too hard to figure out the interface.’ Instead they say, ‘Sooooo? What do I need that for?’ If the online industry is going to attract a lot of new users, we’re going to have to spend less time inventing new features and more time figuring out the answer to the fundamental question of defining something of value that people need and want … Perhaps the thing online services could do today to make the technology more user-friendly is hire a few less programmers and a lot more guides, teachers and facilitators to bridge the gap between the complex resources and people who currently find them arcane.”
Date of prediction: November 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: Wall Street Journal
Title, headline, chapter name: Technology: An Electronic Roundtable: Two Dozen Users and Analysts Examine the Potential – and Shortcomings – of Networks
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Page R24 ISSN: 00999660
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney