Not intuitive

Some arbitrary details can be very important.

Our tutoring consultant had an unusually frustrating session last week.  The student was assigned to write up a Physics lab, one involving the period of a pendulum; she had no difficulty with the concepts and was clear on what she had to do.  But she could not figure out how to make the software construct a graph from her data.  She tried online tutorials and spent much time varying a sequence of actions, without success.  Our tutor suggested a few things, but he had never used the software involved, and had no special insights.

Strictly speaking, the details of one’s software are not part of the subject matter of Physics.  One can master the subject without knowing (say) how to write up a report using Excel, or indeed any particular package.  But in practice any laboratory course includes lessons on how to use the equipment.  And nowadays, with much coursework submitted online, students have to learn how to use a variety of software simply to attend school.

Our navigator makes the comparison with the equipment installed in the various ships he’s served on.  Every ship had a helm to position the rudder, a way to control the speed of the engines, radios of various kinds, navigation equipment, things to monitor and communicate with the interior of the ship, and many more.  The function of each of these stayed the same from ship to ship, but the details of operating them, the “knob-ology,” had to be relearned each time.

And knobology is often arbitrary.  At the lowest level, whether you design an on-off switch to be pushed in, pulled out, flipped up, rotated clockwise or whatever is irrelevant to its function; but you have to choose one.  The same idea applies to hardware and software, to simple and complex actions.  You may know very well what task you want to accomplish, but that won’t necessarily tell you how the designer chose to accomplish it.

Worse, knobology is not necessarily standardized, or intuitive.  Our navigator sailed on a ship that had recently been built in a Korean shipyard, using Japanese electronics, for which there were a complete set of manuals.  But they’d been written by someone for whom English was not a first language, and the reasoning behind many of the knob-sequences was absolutely opaque.

Software knobology is generally far more complicated than its hardware cousin.  As we’ve noted before with calculators and cameras, it’s extremely easy and cheap to add a feature or a function to a program.  So, to make sure everyone can do their favorite action (and thus is willing to buy it), the program has an exhaustive list of features than almost no one ever uses.  The problem is to find out how to do the one you want.  The manual for one calculator we’ve used has 827 pages.  Another was so poorly written that poking about in the menus is often a better option.  Online tutorials are of highly variable quality.

Maybe there should be a class covering only knobology.  But we’re afraid of what the required software would look like.