If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
In the headlong rush to be the most innovative startup around, people will change just about anything. Never mind the fact that, often, there is a reason things are as they are; change is the way of the internet, and all things must be changed.
This attitude is so prevalent because it’s an easy sell: if you don’t change anything, you don’t have a product, and to determine what changes are actually needed is time-consuming and expensive.
I was compelled to write this post after reading this post about “[t]he next generation vision of your future desktop”, whatever that means. It describes a technology called BumpTop, which is essentially a new desktop interface. Unfortunately, most of the changes, while visually appealing, serve only to make the system harder to use.
One is the concept of a three dimensional environment. Screens are two dimensional, displaying icons on the wall of a faux-3D room does nothing to improve usability, and in fact the perspective makes the icons less recognizable and the text less readable.
Another is the idea that, as you move icons around, they bump into and move each other. This is a phenomenally bad idea. A desktop is not a game, you want things to be accessible. Bouncing icons help nobody.
To their credit, they also implemented the ability to resize individual icons, which I can imagine would be very useful for frequently used items.
So not all decisions made were bad, but it would have taken very little thought to weed out those that were, and leave only the good.
Unfortunately, the industry doesn’t care much about marginal improvements: only overhauls ever get talked about. The developers are most probably as aware as I am that most of their devepments would actually detract from the experience, but nobody cares for the suggestion “like Windows, but with resizable icons.” If we want creativity to be directed towards solving real problems instead of arbitrarily innovating, we need to be more discerning in our judgements, and recognize work for its utility, not it’s innovativeness.
