11 Aug 2006 1253H

People can, and will, get used to almost anything


For instance, the QWERTY keyboard. It’s a perfect example about the lessons of usability. The sad fact of the matter is, anyone, anywhere, can get used to anything, no matter how silly, unusable, and counterintuitive a thing may be. Perhaps it is that we trade one convenience for another, because there is nothing else out there like it, and thereby that tool defines all others to come after it: the television, the remote, the graphical user interface, the mouse. To understand this, we turn to history and the layout of the current keyboard. In the old days, when the mechanical typewriter was created, the keystrikes would force a metal rod with type at the end (see, just like the picture above) to strike an inked ribbon and impress that letter on the paper. But occasionally it was possible to have two rods clash with each other, so, the keyboard was rearranged so commonly used combinations of letters would not clash and tangle, resulting, eventually, in the QWERTY keyboard. Even though we no longer use metal type or have to change typewriter ribbons or use white-out — most of us anyway — we still use this keyboard. Isn’t there another way? Indeed there is, the Dvorak keyboard, featuring usability. But this proved to be not as popular. By 1953, a GSA study ascertained that it didn’t really matter which keyboard you used. If you type well, you will type faster, and if you don’t, it will be slow going.

If this is the case, doesn’t it beg the question if the enterprise of usability is much of an improvement over its old, Taylorist predecessor, the time and motion expert? I like to think that in the end what we’re doing is verifying and validating. But what is it we’re validating, if not some measure of objective usability? Is it really something that ought to be called “user satisfaction?”

Back in a bit. Going to install WP 2.04.

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