Flea Market Thinking
Posted on | April 16, 2010 | No Comments
As a support Tech I see two main problems with people relating to computers. The first of which being, NO ONE reads directions. The second of which being that people having not read the directions still seem ill equipped to deal with a situation they have not been shown before.
Enter the Flea Market. Growing up our family frequented flea markets all the time, I especially loved when we would get to spend some money on used nintendo tapes. The cartridges came without directions, but where garunteed to work. A little like trying to operate computers in a lab.
I took great pride on figuring out the games, and how they were meant to be played. I loved the challenge that they put forth. I still regret to this day that there was one game DuckTales, which I couldn’t get.
You played the game as Uncle Scrooge, you had a cane, a dapper hat, and those fun little shoes with the button covers on them. But you didn’t have a traditional weapon. You couldn’t jump on the enemies, you couldn’t whack them with your cane, unless they were tree stumps. I died countless times on that first board. Until I went over my friend robs house and he had the same game… but with the instructions. Apparently through some obtuse command system you had to BOUNCE on your your cane to hit the enemies, in fact a good deal of the game was spent pogo’ing around the worlds. Quite fun.
I took two things away from that awesome yet obtuse control system. First your content needs to be intuitive for the people you know are never going to read your instructions, and secondly you need to write very clear instructions for the few brave souls who do.
But beyond that there is a distinct problem with a good number of the users or the experiences out there. People don’t seem to be able to play the game without instructions, they don’t know how to fiddle with the controls until they get a desired result. Either that or the immediacy of the network has made the long and slow process of learning something, reading instructions or scanning an article a vanishing skill. The task befor the content producers out there is to provide immediate gratification and trick the users into reading longer articles, performing more complex tasks, and playing the game without instructions.
Either that or we need to start shopping at the flea market a bit more often.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler ” Albert Einstein
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