in the discourse on #decentralization of the web, #indieweb, #users vs #corporations, i keep hearing the point that we can’t aim at making everyone into a coder.
i think that subtly misses the point. our current divide between the web-tech-savvy & the users is a result of the web as a business. but with longer-established tasks, like driving cars, we accepted quite a bit of tech-savviness as an expected level of expertise for ‘end users.’ we need to find that for the web.
my defining experience on this: in the research group i work for, i got tasked with providing an interface for our XML files that mirrors the look of the word documents they were derived from.
most of the die-hard insisters on hiding all the tags are now at least peeking at the source for clarity, if not using it all the time. many learned enough XPath to use it as their only search interface. and it wasn’t an uphill battle! they saw me use it, asked, copied, shared, and self-taught.
@gekitsu that's awesome to hear! It makes me feel better about a conversation I had with a tier 2 tech support guy who said he thought keyboard shortcuts were too technical :/ do your users work with these kinds of files as part of their daily activities?
@rubah yes! the project is a glossary of the arabic–latin translations from the 11th to 13th century. from student workers to latinists & arabists, people work in the XML files containing term correlations, source quotations, etc.
i guess the big driver behind people taking to XPath was the immediate & apparent usefulness. finding entries by arbitrary combinations of criteria is unthinkable in a MS word mindset, yet a huge boon for navigating large-ish collections.
@rubah and once there is a foothold of how the parts fit together, some people just took off. i remember coming to work, and a co-worker telling me she had to change some text on our website. so she looked at the files, recognised something XML-ish, and then even managed to look up some required html elements. she’s a really good one, though.
@gekitsu we need to find that for all technology, and it is a design problem imo. I blame apple and "it just works". If you have some time this is a relevant talk I gave.
@qwazix oooh, that was a nice talk! and yeah, i’m with you – good UI is great, but not when it forbids all interaction deeper than the surface. in that regard, i find it infuriating how the apple aesthetic cribbed from dieter rams, who wrote these 10 rules of good design: https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design – his idea of design puts some pretty tough moral duties on designers. and apple copy the look while deliberately violating these dictums.
(also, applause for ‘if you know how to dig…’)
we generally don’t use chauffeurs as specialised driving skill providers. we might drive a vehicle that requires manual shifting of gears. we refuel. we refill wiper fluid. we check oil. we look up what warning lights mean in the manual. we might even take care of cooling liquid or change tyres. we also have an idea when we need to take it to the shop.
i feel that when we say ‘we can’t demand to make everyone into a coder,’ we apply a definition instead of thinking about reasonable expertise.