When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how you can jump many times your height, as if you’re a bug.
When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness.
User interfaces are the first line of computer instruction, and for many people are the last line too. Not every interface designer does their job equally well. The problems mostly emerge from designers’ presuming implicit knowledge from the user that might not really be there. There’s plenty of computer science that seems like obvious common knowledge to programmers and engineers that remains opaque or esoteric to the population at large. For example, the general public uses the terms memory and storage interchangeably, even though they refer to different computer components that function in very different ways.
When the computer crashes, it hasn’t stopped working. It appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you, but it continues to hum along as fast as usual. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over.
It’s hard to get a feel for looping failures, because computers have become so fast that you can’t see what they’re doing on an instruction-by-instruction basis. Fortunately, Super Mario Bros has a famous bug known as the Minus World that lets you study an infinite loop in an entertainingly interactive form. (more…)