Tuesday, November 09, 2004
More 'blame the user'
On the US elections, from Kablenet, this week:According to IT industry representatives, human error had accounted for most of the problems. They maintained that technology passed the test. Grrr. Design a poor system. Blame the users. Continue to use poorly designed system. Blame the users. And so on.
I am, I suppose, in the IT industry. But I fail to identify with this position. Because it's completely pointless and gets us nowhere.
We build this stuff for people, not for other machines. These machines do not exist in a vacuum, they're part of a wider system that includes people, citizens. If people have problems with the stuff we design, we need to rethink the design. And if we are designing for everyone - as we are with voting - including your grandmother and mine, we need to build something our grandmothers can use. There's no point declaiming 'human error' or 'user error' ad infinitum, like some mantra, and carrying on with business as usual back in the developer cave.
4:02 PM|
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