Maya on Interaction

A street canvasser got me the other day. Street canvassers are committed to expose darkness in the souls of passers-by. They yell out all sorts of difficult questions that insinuate roughly the same thing: Write your credit card number on my clipboard or I’ll carve “I don’t want to help the visually impaired” or “I’m keen to promote drug abuse” on your tombstone.

The canvasser routine is tough but no match for my killer canvasser line: “Look mate, I’m interested in fighting whatever social ill is on your mind. Thing is, I’m not a make-fiscal-decisions-on-the-street sort of lady. I’m a make-decisions-on-a-website lady. So fork over a URL and I’ll take it from here.”

Street canvassers always recede in the dust of my blazing line. But Henrique the Help the Aged campaigner at lunchtime on Old Street was unperturbed. Not a split second after I uttered it, he came back with this one: “I’ll be your website.”

I was floored. For one thing, it was touching. For another, I couldn’t figure out what to do. It was obvious that he didn’t support navigation or keyword search, there was nothing to click, no overview of the information space and no interaction sequence was specified.

The gut-wrenching truth of the matter is that I don’t know how to use these things. In this our age of web personalisation, pipes and collaborative filtering, we want applications to act like beings who get us. Meanwhile, facing Henrique the information-dispensing human, all I could do was stutter and pray for a manual to drop from heaven.

My reaction is characteristic of what Natasha and Tamar have called the Nell problem. It’s unbecoming and I’m resolved to lick it. Esteemed readers, beloved friends: I’ll be your website. Just tell me how. Think of a tip you’d give a Martian (or a mildly disoriented Canadian in the throws of Saturn’s return) before sending her off to the pub. For each bit of advice you post here, I will 1. cherish it and 2. put five quid into a pot for the Help the Aged Enough is Enough appeal. I’ll tack your comments to my bedroom wall and make the donation on the 30th of April. Watch this space for grand totals and spiritual progress.