An unreadable book on usability
Sadly, Ben Shneiderman’s book Leonardo’s Laptop, rather than taking its inspiration from da Vinci and using his ideas to inform an intelligent foray into usability, conscripts the great man as the author’s mouthpiece, and contrives to spew almost uninterrupted marketese, in the process getting under the skin of the thoughtful reader by mis-quoting Star Trek, glibly asserting that computers will never be creative, and presenting as the ideal future a vision that could have come straight from a Silicon Valley press release.
Fortunately, Schneiderman does have one significant point of difference with the techno-utopian mainstream, and that is his insistence that technology must support human goals and be adapted to them rather than the other way around. He cleverly attacks the idea that technology should aim to replace humans by turning it on its head: ”The goal of making computers do what humans do, the replacement theory, also seems rather modest. Imagine proposing to make a bulldozer that lifts as much as the strongest human, or a printer that writes as fast as the best human scribe.” (p. 238), and while many readers will groan at the inane rhetoric of ”Why can’t every student earn an A?” (p. 112), he succeeds in making those who would replace humans look misguided and unimaginative. He does not, however, address the issue of technologies that modify, rather than merely amplify, human capabilities, and his soft-focus futurism (”Imagine that after a sunrise climb you reach the summit. You open up your phonecam and send a panoramic view to your grandparents, parents and friends. They hear the sound of birds, smell of mountain air, feel the coolness of wind, and experience your feeling of success.” (p. 2)) suggests that it’s something he’d rather not think about.
Schneiderman is an HCI specialist, and Leonardo’s Laptop takes the obvious approach for such a practitioner: after an introduction that uses Leonardo to emphasise the importance of technology that supports human values, he shows us a glimpse of how the future could and should be, diagnoses what is wrong with current computer interfaces, connects this to our low expectations and misguidedly technocratic approach to technology development, sketches the HCI approach to designing computer systems, and develops a systematic framework for it, applies the ideas to the individual consumer’s view of education, retailing, medicine and government, and ends with a discussion of creativity and a final chapter that returns to the theme of “promoting human values” (About this book, p. 14).
In the course of the book, Schneiderman develops some useful tools for thinking about how people use computers. His Activities and Relationships Table (ART, pp. 87ff.) is a simple two-dimensional matrix associating four stages of creative activity (Collect, Relate, Create, Donate) and four levels of relationship (Self, Family and friends, Colleagues and neighbors, Citizens and markets), allowing technologies to be placed on a map by the activities they support. His last chapter, “Mega-Creativity”, offers a simple and usable list of types of creative task (p. 219). These tools are unsophisticated and obvious, but Schneiderman’s willingness to dive into the tricky area of creativity and offer a straightforward discussion is refreshing. His discussion of situational creativity (dealing with the importance of one’s environment and relationships) was particularly interesting, as it’s frequently neglected in other discussions. This attempt at a comprehensive framework may underpin the admirable breadth of Schneiderman’s application areas, from the personal to the political, including health, education and commerce.
Unfortunately, some of his examples are ill-chosen. The idea that the excellent Sim City “teaches deep lessons about urban planning” (p. 222) is news even to this high-school student of human geography, as is the description of Dramatica Pro, a tool for writing film scripts based on a theory of story-telling, is “compelling” (pp. 222–3). (I would have been much more impressed by a discussion of Inform, or other interactive fiction authoring systems.) At the end of the book, when discussing what use a modern-day Leonardo (“Leonardo II”) might make of technology, he gives the example of using email and instant messaging for collaboration. This is not stirring stuff for a book published in 2002.
These examples are also typical of the software Schneiderman both describes and, more tellingly, envisages: large closed-system proprietary solutions such as LEON (a collaborative online learning tool, p. 116) and, more nebulously, the World Wide Med (information for medical professionals, p. 175). He has a standard capitalist attitude to copyright, yet cheerfully uses public domain prints of works by Leonardo. His two-page discussion of freedom in a political context (pp. 184–5) does not mention free software. Again, curious given when the book was written.
I should confess that Schneiderman lost my sympathy early on with his p. 52 attack on “obscure” text-based interfaces, rightly criticizing the élitist culture of some devotees, but ignoring their advantages, particularly in the internet age: text is easy to store, search and transmit (between computers and humans). Graphical user interfaces also suffer from obscurity, and are often less amenable to user modification. It’s all the odder given that he later lauds text-based chat (p. 199), and that text-based interfaces can much more easily be adapted to level-structured learning (p. 47).
However, Schneiderman’s biggest weakness (and, one is tempted to think, his closest point of contact with Leonardo), alluded to at the start of this review, is his unwillingness to address the political and social context. Despite castigating an opponent for arguing that an issue ”was outside his concern and something for policymakers to decide” he rarely does more than state the political and social obstacles between him and his goals, and say that research or public debate will be necessary. In his summary chapter on ”Mega-Creativity”, he blandly ends ”Participatory design methods and comprehensible, widely disseminated social impact statements may be effective because they promote discussion and expand the range of options for decision makers.” (p. 231) This is barely more than a restatement of the problem; and a tendency to hedge (”support for innovation could lead to positive changes to our world” (p. 230)) gives what should be his boldest passages the flavour of a corporate press release that had to be approved by the company lawyers. At a smaller scale, he has little idea what to do with misbehaving individuals: his discussion of education does not mention discipline, or, in the context of collaboration, ethical behaviour by students, whether in the sense of contributing fairly, or, that bug-bear of educators in the internet age, plagiarism.
His human-centred focus also leads to an unfortunate dismissal of AI. “Even serious scientists are prone to considering artificial consciousness as a good, useful and attainable research goal.” (p. 236) There is indeed a debate about whether artificial consciousness is “good, useful and attainable”, but it is odd that Schneiderman sees no human-centred applications for it, given for instance Japanese efforts to make artificial companions.
On the other hand, Schneiderman also repeatedly skates over potential down-sides, as with his ”World-Wide Med” system for globally shared medial records, or ”LEON” framework to support collaborative learning: his enthusiastic description of imaginary future successes is not balanced by his brief ”Skeptic’s Corner” sections, which do little more than acknowledge that there are problems and say that they are worthy of solution.
The book ends: “Those who believe that they can shape the future will shape the future.” Unfortunately, the author does not seem to be a believer.
15th May 2017
Last updated 2017/05/15