What to make of Gruber?
As a long-time Daring Fireball reader and t-shirt–wearer (the discontinued white ringer is my favorite), I've often wondered what, exactly, to make of pundit/aesthete John Gruber.
His longer articles are often extremely insightful; there have been so many times I've said "My God, I never thought about it that way" when reading him. He keeps his finger on the pulse of the Mac world and his sources seem to be very good, which is very refreshing. And even though his "Jackass of the Week" posts are getting annoying, someone has to do it.
But every now and then he writes something that makes me question whether he has any idea of what he's talking about.
Today, talking about the annoying iPhone camera capture button, he writes:
It’s highly counterintuitive because while software buttons almost always work like this (activating on release), camera shutters always activate on press.
Oy. No. I don't think that word means what you think it means. If something is counterintuitive, it means that it can't be learned without observation or reasoned experimentation, not that is violates user expectations based on how similar devices work. This is such such a rookie, first day of HCI 101 kind of mistake that I wonder how Gruber got his reputation as a UI guru in the first place. It's like saying Dvorak keyboards are counterintuitive because most keyboards are Qwerty or that joysticks are counterintuitive for steering because we're used to huge-ass steering wheels designed in a time before power hydraulics and fly-by-wire made torque on the steering column unnecessary.
The interfaces exposed by camera shutter buttons, keyboards, and steering wheels are artifacts of prior design constraints. They are the way they are not because they're necessarily intuitive but because they were the best we could do a hundred years ago.
So Gruber obviously doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to HCI.
But here's the thing: his design sense is so keen that it doesn't matter. Like Steve Jobs, he has that certain je ne sais quoi which means he can ignorant of the theory and yet still be an exceptional designer.
This makes people like me, who are aware of the theory and yet still crappy designers, very, very jealous.