User-Friendly

In Robert Heinlein’s 1957 adventure novel, Citizen Of The Galaxy, the main character - a slave boy named Thorby - finds himself thrown into an empty cell on a spacecraft overnight.  The room appears featureless - just floor, walls, ceiling.  After searching for any kind of switch or shelf, he spends a miserable night curled up on the steel floor with the lights on.

The next day, he is taken under the wing of another boy who is amazed at his stupidity.  The other boy shows him how to operate the controls of the room, revealing hidden bed, table, light and temperature controls, a sink and a viewer full of stored media for information and entertainment.  The featureless cell turns out to be a very well-equipped cabin room.

Which leads to my definition of the term; “User-Friendly”; adj., meaning “That which is familiar to the user”.

I just spent an hour and a half figuring out how to install Flash on my son’s Linux laptop.  Admittedly I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer but it just wasn’t obvious to me.  Turned out to be only something like five clicks using the Synaptic package manager - about the same as in Windows through the browser.  But intuitive, it was not.  There were even contraindications.  What the hell is “Flashplugin Nonfree”?  Turned out that’s what I needed.  Once I remembered that in Linux, you can’t install Flash in the browser like you can Windows.  You need something called a “package manager”.

But hey - it’s easy!  I suppose if I’d spent the last 13 years supporting Linux I’d think Windows was counterintuitive.

Posted by George on 05/05/08 at 11:01 PM
Geeky • Design • (11) Comments • Link
Page 1 of 1 pages