[Sigia-l] Do Make Me Think!

[Ziya Oz]

Dave Chiu:

> Taken to an extreme, I'm really not interested in becoming a
> carpenter to assemble IKEA furniture, a broker to trade shares, or a
> travel agent to book a flight. But I do want to know enough to make
> the best decision I can in a given situation at a given time, and the
> service or product which best enables me to do so will get my
> business. 

Good point.  There is, however, a flip side to this: "just enough to make
the best decision" may serve users well, or may harm them. It wasn't
coincidental that millions of users lost more than a trillion dollars
trading away with gusto during the dotcom era, no doubt facilitated by
online services that enabled them to get financial info and then transact in
a way that was largely opaque to them previously. From self-medication to
day trading, tools/sites/apps have emerged and given us the impression that
we're now enabled to deal with the promises they implicitly make. Some do a
remarkable job, most don't.

> Consider the newspaper which provides only a stock's most
> recent price quote versus an online trading service which provides
> news, the trading ranges for the last 50 days, trend analysis, etc.

(And as a result, most papers have stopped running these monstrosities,
including finally the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and
Chicago Tribune.)

Most media/content companies make money by creating a one-way pipe, from
producer to consumer, based on some manner of scarcity. So users thinking,
(re)arranging, mashing up, self-serving, etc., are fundamentally inimical to
their next-quarter balance sheet. Designers who get their checks from these
companies are, and will be for some time, in a bind to reconcile the
opposing forces.

Which also means that there's commercial opportunity to create services that
transfer the know-how to the user and arbitrage the difference, as some
companies have begun to demonstrate.

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem