Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [66]
The biggest question is how bit-literate users will change the technology industry. There are many improvements they may press for: better user interfaces, more direct access to their bits, less proprietary file formats, and more reliable tools that don’t require buying an “upgrade” every two or three years. Bits should be accessible and manageable by everyone who wants them. By using and buying only the most bit-literate tools, and not purchasing others, users may finally bring about a change in an industry that has such potential to improve people’s lives. First, though, users must learn and practice the discipline.
The future belongs to bit-literate users. The world will continue to change, bringing new bitstreams, new devices, and new challenges. By any measure of productivity or health, bit-literate users will benefit the most. And that makes it a bright future, no matter what changes occur. The next upgrade, the next buzzword, the next fad all come and go, but the user stays. Bit literacy will remain, too: a discipline that invites users to let the bits go, in order to work more productively and live fuller, healthier lives.
Appendix A: Message to Developers
As important as bit literacy is for the future of technology users, it's even more important for developers. Users will increasingly demand, and buy, bit-literate tools—of which there are nearly none today. The market opportunity is enormous. Consider the few bit-literate tools available to users today:
– One todo list (Gootodo.com)
– Few calendar programs (Now Up-to-Date for the Mac; Google Calendar for all platforms)
– Several text editors (TextWrangler for the Mac, for example) that are mostly optimized for programmers' needs
– Two photo-management tools (Picasa for Windows and iPhoto for Mac)
– Not a single e-mail program (The industry should be embarrassed by its lack of progress. Claris Emailer v1, released in 1996 for the Mac, is superior to most e-mail programs today. I know of no bit-literate e-mail programs ever made in Windows, and no online e-mail service today is fully bit-literate.)
It wouldn't take much to fill this market need. All it requires is properly trained developers and a little bit of time; no expensive, high-tech features are necessary. In fact, many existing tools could be improved greatly by adding a few low-tech, easily implemented features, and removing or hiding unnecessary, distracting features that are irrelevant to most users.
Bit-literate developers must design tools that invite users to become bit-literate themselves. Such a tool must be empathetic to users' level of expertise when they begin using it, yet still offer a path toward future growth.
We can thus state two complementary guidelines for bit-literate development:
1. Always, in all cases, "first things first": make basic tasks the easiest and quickest to perform, and display the most important information most prominently, while hiding secondary information and advanced features (which only a minority of advanced users will seek out). "First things first" allows all users to start using a tool as quickly and easily as possible, attaining immediate benefits from the tool with the least investment of time and energy.
2. At the same time, give users a way to continually improve their productivity: invite them to invest more in order to gain more. This means offering bit-literate features, options, and preferences that allow users to work better, faster, and more accurately, if they wish to do so.
With those two guidelines in mind, below are some more specific feature requests.
Bit-literate tools should...
– Set better defaults. The factory settings of any tool should be the ones that are in the long-term interest of the user. Marketing departments sometimes set defaults in the company's favor, or "what we can get away with without