techno-whati?
dear Dogs on Trucks,please explain to me why you think this techronuti search program or whatever is better than my old favorites.
life is too short to bother learning something that's going to be useless as soon as you figure it out.
Sincerely,
Pam in Minnesota
Dear Pam,
Thanks a lot for writing. I agree with you! I have no patience for badly designed search tools. That is my point exactly.
Imagine if you were walking down a street one day and you saw a restaurant that had a sign on it that said, "Every possible dish you can imagine is in this restaurant, just tell us what you want to eat and we will cook it up and bring it right to your table right away!"
So of course, you go in there. And you say to the server, please bring me a goat cheese omlette and a glass of carrot juice.
And the server (who is a robot) goes to kitchen and comes back with a macaroni and cheese TV dinner. "Cheezy Food!" announces the robot proudly.
"No, robot!" you say. "This isn't what I wanted!"
"Yes, it is," says Robot. "Me know English real good. Me know what you want. Pop N' Moppy's Cheezy treat #1 most popular hu-mon food item. Low in calories and good for hu-mons. Also look! Cute picture on package. You love it."
So of course you are steamed and you leave the restaurant, and you are getting even hungrier, because you have already started thinking about that goat cheese omlette. Then you see another sign that says "RESTAURANT" in big letters and below that it says "we have a very wide selection of food and although we have robots for waiters we do have real humans working here!"
So you go in the restaurant and you order your omlette and pretty much the same thing happens all over again, only this time the waiter brings you a serving tray of Happy Rainbow heat-n-eat goat meat.
So of course you are really grumpy now and you complain about it to the robot and say, "I would like to speak to a real person, please!"
And the robot goes in the back and comes back with a photocopied feedback form that says "Thank you for choosing Happy Rainbow restaurant! So that we may serve you better in the future, please tell us whether our sevice was Exceptional, less than exceptional, or above average? Please mail this form to the Real Human department at Happy Rainbow world headquarters at such-and-such address."
So you tell the robot where he can stick his feedback form and you're off. You walk and you walk, your stomach growling madly.
Suddenly you hear the sound of kitchenware, and human voices. Could it be? You turn the corner and you see a little sign that says, "RESTAURANT. All our food is prepared by real humans. We do our best here to train our robot servers in the proper use of English, but since robots are not that smart you may wish to choose from our ten daily specials. "
On the menu you see a smoked cheddar omlette with parsley and ramps and even though you don't know what ramps are, you are curious to taste them and you think that the smoked cheddar omlette sounds delicious. So you sit down and order the omlette and when the robot comes back it brings you just what you asked for plus an interesting surprise: you find out you love ramps!
That is why I am such a fan of Technorati, Pam. Robots are ok for some jobs, but they make terrible information chefs.
I hope that sort of answers your question, and I hope you have a nice day.
Sincerely,
Dogs on Trucks
tags: information design, fuzzy searching, information architecture
posted by dogs on trucks jr. @ 8:06 AM
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