Maya on Interaction

Usability is a virtue of literature not just websites.

A client and friend once told me that he is plagued by systems that are well-conceived but ill-understood.

The applications he built were rich in the functionality that his users ached for. To his perpetual distress, however, they continued to ache long after the application was delivered.

If, like him, you paid my bosses 90 Canadian dollars per hour for my usability sermons, I�d churn out insight that�s purely intuitive and that could easily have come to you in the shower. I�m sure I�d attack your navigation scheme. In particular, I�d ask why you chose to put terms or phrases on navigation links that make sense to you and your work cronies, but that give users no inkling of what they could expect to find once they clicked.

Websites, if they�re to persuade us to divulge our credit card numbers, need to take every opportunity to instruct. It would be nice if academic articles did the same.

Digesting academic information systems literature, the usability witch in me rages �quit hogging bandwidth and get to the goddamn point.� I probably need a new line more suitable for paper journals, but I think line for scholars is the same as for web designers: use plain language.

You might suppose that hospitality is just a warm impulse that kicks in when a foreigner walks onto your turf. But if you’re one of these astute folks whose hallways I’ve been loitering in lately, you might see it instead as “an institutional device to cut down the time needed to merge cultures and to integrate alien mindsets.

Let’s recognize that that companies (unless they’re clueless) are polygamous opportunistic beasts. They meet, mate and morph quicker than you can say ‘strategic partnership’ or ‘outsource.’Long-term visions are out. Seduce me with a promise of a stable future and there might be something charmingly retro about your approach but mostly it’s tacky. Like a smart woman, a smart organisation won’t bind itself to a marriage contract with its technology. What if my interests change? What if we become incompatible? What if it stops generating revenue? and starts draining my revenue? So if we can’t do business by committing to a particular vision of the future, then how do we propose to implement the information systems for which we expect to bill mercilessly?

Claudio Ciborra urges us to consider an institution more appropriate to relationships in “the age of dynamic efficiency” i.e. hospitality. Let us not harness technology but invite it in for tea. As our guest, we can’t know or decide exactly how it will interact with us, but we can introduce it to our customs. “Now, now technology, in this organisation we don’t automatically publish reports, we wait until approving officer clicks a button. But I can see that you want to keep information flowing. Perhaps you might generate a signal to alert approving officer that the report is waiting in a repository.”

Moreover, if we relax and give technology some leeway to be itself, we might discover some thrilling quirks. “Would you look at that Jim, if you pull this lever, before cranking that chain, technology will sort these reports by approving officer. How foolish of us to have been sorting them by authoring team all these years.”

Technology, let us be enriched by your visit without entitling you to stay indefinitely. Let us reach into and cultivate one anothers terrain without dissolving the border between us. Let us negotiate an interaction that draws from our respective traditions and let us generate new heat together.

My main gig at the moment is to be a student in the information systems department at the LSE. As far as I can tell, the department is essentially a gang of nihilist comp sci types who’ve gotten together to teach swarms of students that information system development is an un-orderly ritualistic activity whose outcome turns on the alignment of planets or the flapping of an insect’s wings in just the right place at just the right moment. (Or, at the wrong place at the wrong moment if you’re a victim rather than a beneficiary of an information systems project - which you probably are.)