How Dumb Can You Get?

Star Trek fans: remember those Next Generation episodes in which Data would do something out of character, and Picard would suspect Data was malfunctioning? Picard would say, “Data, perform a self-diagnosis,” and Data would search through his circuits (he was an android, oh you non-Trekkies), find the problem, and tell Geordi exactly where to perform the repair or download the patch.*

So why doesn’t my Mac tell me where to find the System Preferences?

I’m in the process of doing a rapid review of Mac Help, since I will be working on some aspect of it. My first stop was the Spotlight Help, for the simple reason that though I realized that my Mac contained something called Spotlight, and that Spotlight had something to do with finding things, I had never actually used it.

I opened the topic “Setting Preferences for Spotlight,” and read:

1. Open System Preferences and click Spotlight.

Eh? Open System Preferences? And where might I find System Preferences?

Okay, I know where to find System Preferences. But what if I was a naive user? What if I was Bart’s Mom? The instructional designer who wrote this help should have included, as part of step 1, exactly how to perform the step. So like a typically annoying new employee, I asked about this at a meeting. It turns out that it is deliberate, because the writers at Apple are faced with the same problem as Help writers everywhere: the Mac OS, unlike Commander Data, is unable to explain itself.

Normally, the writer solves a problem like this either by writing more text (“Open the Apple menu and choose System Preferences”), or by including a picture of the interface element that must be clicked. But we want less text, not more! And we don’t want to bulk up Mac Help’s footprint by including a bunch of pictures.

And most of all, we think it’s just plain silly. Why should we have to embed a picture of the System Preferences icon into the Help steps, when the darned thing is just sitting down at the bottom of the screen in the Dock, where the user can plainly see it if he or she only knew where to look?

Why isn’t the Mac smart enough to say, “You want Preferences? Wait a sec; I’ll circle the icon for you.” Or, even better, “Allow me. I’ll open it for you.”

Amusingly enough, the Mac used to do this back in the day, when Mac Help was based on Apple Guide. But the Apple Guide technology wasn’t pushed forward and is no longer used.

I think the reason why we never seem to make any headway in online help is because the Powers That Be continue to see it as a replacement for “The Book.” Even in open source projects like Flock — actually, especially Flock — the people making the decisions see online help as something external to the product. It’s like the little paper manual that comes with the refrigerator or washing machine.

But online help is not a book! Online help is the machine explaining itself. It should be like Data on Star Trek. But when the machine can’t show you where it keeps its icons, or menus, or whatever you’re trying to find — well, then it just looks like a dumb refrigerator.

——–

* Okay, sticklers, in “The Schizoid Man” Data is unable to detect the problem, due to sabotage.

Rewind

I’m at Apple.

For the past few days I’ve felt like I’m in a time warp. I’ve rewound my life, and returned to Apple. I’ve resumed my old position as an instructional designer, in my old department, with several of my old friends. I’m back in the old building on Infinite Loop, just down the hall from the office where I used to sit. I’ve even got my old employee number and email address!

Did the past eight years really happen? Did I leave Apple for Netscape, and work on Navigator and Mozilla and Flock? I must have, because my brain seems to be filled with information about browsers that can only come from over-exposure.

The beauty of it is, several of my fellow Netscapees are here, two. They came to Apple, of course, to create Safari, and now I get to work with them once again.

For a while now I’ve had it on my mind to write a little something about why it turned out to be so hard to work at Flock, much as I loved the place. And why I find it so hard — impossible, maybe — to work on open source projects in general.

I’ve come to a two-pronged conclusion about it: open source communities are tough on women, and open source communities are tough on non-engineers. Since I’m a female non-engineer, I’m doubly cursed.

Soon I will share the stories that support this two-pronged conclusion. But for now I must continue rewinding my professional life back to Apple.

It’s good to be back.