Like the Sarlacc, I take a long time to digest things, such as months-old magazine articles. But, hey, Mom always said to chew your food.
So, back to Chris Anderson’s Wired article, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, which I mentioned previously. In it, he gives one explanation as to why developers never embraced user experience as an important aspect of their work:
An entire generation of computer professionals had been taught that their job was to dole out expensive computer resources sparingly. <snip> As a result, early developers devoted as much code as possible to running their core algorithms efficiently and gave little thought to user interface.
Of course, computers were not free then, and they are not free today. But <snip> the transistors in them — the atomic units of computation — would become so numerous that on an individual basis, they’d be close enough to costless that they might as well be free. That meant software writers, liberated from worrying about scarce computational resources like memory and CPU cycles, could become more and more ambitious, focusing on higher-order functions such as user interfaces and new markets such as entertainment.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons for the longtime neglect of usability, including the fact that perhaps until recently, computer programming as an educational field (and in the early days, you did need to get schooling to work and teach in the field) attracted people who were left-brain dominant. Holistic, bi-hemispheric thinkers, who might be more inclined to synthesize the functional goals of a computer program with the needs of users, are a more recent arrival in the development world. Or, at least there weren’t enough of them to make a difference until the advent of the Web.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I’ve just found your site on readwriteweb. Great post. I’ll come back!