How much Steve Klug’s credo is good good FIRE!
After reading the waggish selection from Don’t Make Me Think, I respect and agree with the author Steve Klug’s slogan. In a web design class, I wanted to make my buttons and links unique and more on-brand with the graphic design, but why? If customers have to re-learn what a button or a link is on a site I’ve designed, then it’s not helping the business no matter how color coordinated or brand specific they might look.
Oddly, the one place I’ve discovered a mammoth dichotomy in Klug’s Don’t Make Me Think philosophy is within Apple’s evolved simplicity of UI and UX. Since the introduction of the iPhone and its touted ease-of-use, Apple’s continued to produce devices that seem to adhere to the philosophy of DMMT. I’ve watched for myself as children who’ve never touched technology – toddlers who haven’t yet learned how to navigate a TV remote – pick up an iPhone and are preternaturally able to navigate to exactly the function they want, yet can barely speak.
One of my friends is a true polymath capable of whatever he puts his mind to: boundary-pushing physics, wooden boat building, museum database construction, scientific collection trips to Eurasia… literally anything. Yet when he sat down at a Macintosh computer for a new project, he was suddenly reduced to an imbecilic level, incapable of being able to simply eject a compact disc from the machine.
I’m no better. When I pick up any Apple device, I’m completely lost. Nothing makes me feel older than handling anything with a lower-case “i” in front of its name. How can navigating an Apple device be so natural to a child, yet so inorganic and painful to someone who’s spent a lifetime with computers?
Ultimately it makes me wonder if perhaps my non-Apple friends and I have been trained so well in what makes left-brain sense that when presented with a much more childlike and right-brained system, we’re not able to function, feeling like we’re overthinking it to the point of frustration. How I wish I could experience that lack of any thought with Apple, but Windows-based flow allows me to switch off thought and navigate sites and apps quickly. Interesting, no?
