San Francisco is a wonderful place – I ended up having an interesting discussion last night with a self-styled “geek-at-large” about robots, ethics and unix while hanging out at a not-for-profit who are improving the world one wi-fi network at a time.
The robot maker’s argument was that robots don’t have to be super intelligent to carry out some pretty useful, robotic, tasks. He was suggesting that there’s a blind-alley in robotic research premised on being able to map and track everything in your environment in order to move and interact effectively. His argument was that instead you just needed to be able to identify a goal to move towards and be able to avoid collisions. That is a much simpler goal than understanding your whole environment.
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I think I first heard the phrase “the first bite is with the eye” from a TV chef, but it applies equally to the software creation process as it does to cookery.
A user’s interaction with a piece of software or web site is as much emotional as it is functional. Compare the soft, warm, fuzzy feeling you get when first interacting with a product from 37 Signals, say, to the stomach churning reaction you get when booting up Lotus Notes, for example.
This immediate emotional response will pervade the whole of a user’s long-term impression of a product, imbuing their relationship with whatever feeling was conjured up in those preliminary interactions. They say that in most job interviews the interviewer makes up their mind within the first 5 minutes. The same is equally true for software.
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