Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered.html

by baran • 16 years ago

5 1 16 years ago

The stuff about the human interface for musical instruments is just hokey. It lends no support to the author's argument. Acoustic instruments have the user interfaces that they have because the physics of sound production made more usable interfaces impractical to build. And, indeed, now that electronics have enabled alternative means of sound production, the design of more intuitive and usable interfaces for musical instruments is an active area of research and development. Likewise, musical notation is an anachronism that has survived more as a matter of tradition than on the merits of the design. If you take a look at the design of most MIDI sequencer software, you'll find that piano roll notation has largely replaced traditional music notation as the default interface because it is so much more intuitive.

Most people who attempt to learn to play an acoustic instrument take lessons for a few months and eventually quit because the user interfaces are so difficult to learn. The idea that software should in any way emulate this sort of design is incomprehensible to me, since the design of software is not nearly so constrained as the design of a physical instrument. On a trumpet, you have to hold down the first and third valve key and extend a slide by a precise amount with your ring finger to play the D above middle C, but the fingering for D an octave higher is completely different. If you're playing in any kind of a group, you also have to be aware that your instrument is really a B flat instrument and transpose the notes accordingly to play along with everyone else. If your software had a bizarre interface like this, nobody would buy it unless absolutely no other alternative existed.

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

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