Skunkzilla says: “Read the Manual!"
This is the ultimate skunkie, the biggest, meanest, most ferocious of all the skunkies. It is everywhere, and has been steadily taking over the entire software world for the last twenty years. Skunkzillas are software commands for which the user has no way of knowing other than to get help from Customer Service or a more experienced user.
Oura Ring
Here’s an example: the Oura Ring. This is a metal ring in which have been embedded a load of sensors, some serious processing power, a Bluetooth interface, and some memory. You pair it with your smartphone and it will report the data it has collected about your body over the previous 24 hours. I got mine over a year ago and very much like it.
But then I replaced my ancient iPhone 8 with a shiny new iPhone 14 (which is pretty much the same as the iPhone 8, except that it has a much faster processor, so it can process my finger strokes in 2.2 microseconds instead of 6.4 microseconds). Alas, my Oura Ring refused to pair with my iPhone 14, so it was useless. I got on the Oura Ring website and asked customer service how to fix the problem. Six days later, having received no answer, I sent another email notifying them that I was cancelling my subscription (Yes, even after you buy the ring for $300, you still have to pay $7 per month to use it.) That got a response. They explained that I had to “unpair” the Oura Ring from my iPhone 8 before I could pair it with my iPhone 14. There was no way for me to have figured this out from the Oura Ring app on my iPhone. It is a secret instruction.
iPhone
The iPhone teems with Skunkzillas; I struggle to figure out how they were able to squeeze so many inside that little phone. Skunkzillas thrive in the iPhone environment for two reasons. First the input capabilities are limited to the touchscreen. There’s no mouse and no keyboard, so all input must be expressed by touching something on the screen. The designers of iPhone software, desperate to squeeze performance out of that teensy-weensy input capability, have invented all manner of clever variations on the finger-touch. There’s the tap, the scroll, the swipe, the flick, the drag, and the pinch. There’s another finger gesture often resorted to by frustrated users, but it doesn’t show up in the documentation.
Smartphones of all types defy all the basic rules of good user interface design. Back in the early 80s, the hot term was “WYSIWYG” (“whizzy-wig”). With smart phones, it’s WYSHNTDWWYG — an appropriately unpronounceable mess that stands for “What you see has nothing to do with what you get”.
Here’s a graph showing the progress of user interface design
This graph has a lot of information. It shows the three user interface systems that have been used:
Command Line Interfaces (CLI), which were used in big mainframe computers from the 60s through the 80s.
Graphical User Interfaces, popularized by Macintosh starting in 1984
Mobile User Interfaces, used on smartphones.
The vertical axis shows the verb count of typical applications during that time period; the red curve shows how the number of verbs in applications increased over the years. There was a great deal of variation between applications, so the red curve represents only a rough average.
Note that, over time, both the GUIs and the MUIs showed some improvement, being able to handle large numbers of verbs. But note also that the number of verbs these interfaces could handle fell far, far below the actual number of verbs used in applications. This shortfall is partially ameliorated by the ready availability of help on the Internet, especially through user group fora in which users help each other. Without those fora, the computer industry would collapse.
The problem will only grow worse and worse with the passage of time. We’re putting more and more capabilities into our computers and our smartphones, but those capabilities are growing harder and harder to access. The software universe is overrun with Skunkzillas.
But wait!
There is a savior ready to come to our rescue, a white knight who will save the day for us. Indeed, he’s be waiting on the sidelines for over twenty years:
The Vocal User Interface (VUI) is the obvious and natural way to interface with the computer; after all, that’s how we interface with each other. Instead of playing all these ridiculous games with mice and keyboards and doing weird things with our fingers and guessing how to do things, we should just TELL the computer what we want it to do.
Speech recognition technology has now advanced to the point where it can understand any simple sentence using plain English. Sure, if you want to get poetic or quote Shakespeare, it probably won’t comprehend your meaning, but for our needs, speech recognition is good enough.
Another potential problem is background noise. What happens if you’re trying to talk to your iPhone while a garbage truck is loading a trash bin just outside? Or what if you’re in a crowded subway car with people talking all around you? Yep, in such situations, you can’t do much with your iPhone. But I see that as an inconvenience, not a killer problem.
The “Vocal Saboteur” imagined by some people sounds frightening: you’re busily wrapping up your memo when some jerk sneaks up behind you and loudly declares, “Computer, delete file!” Again, I don’t see that as a serious problem. The jerk doing that in a workplace will get fired, and you shouldn’t be working on a business memo at a party. More important, modern speech recognition technology is good enough to recognize different speakers, so the computer is more likely to respond to the jerk by saying out loud, “Get lost, Danny!”
Moreover, it’s not difficult to equip computers with special microphones. You already know about headsets with mikes immediately in front of your mouth. It’s easy for the speech recognition algorithms to tell the difference between phonemes (the sounds coming out of your mouth) that YOU enunciate and noise coming from elsewhere.
I suspect that the greatest problem with VUIs will be their use in a crowded environment. If you’re on a flight from New York to Singapore, you don’t want to be sitting next to some fellow talking to his computer. That’s just as rude as talking on a phone. Perhaps this problem can be answered with clever hoods or shields that cover your lower face, so that you can whisper to the mike without disturbing other people. Perhaps.
It’s true, then, that there are problems with VUIs. But the problems caused by hordes of Skunkzillas are worse. All in all, the sooner we make the transition to VUIs, the happier we’ll all be.