I’m a fan of doing things by hand – pen/pencil on paper – before you start to use your computer. The very second you fire up your computer you start to think in the way the software things… or rather how it forces you to think. I can’t prove it but it seems to me that the designer(s) had a specific way of thinking in mind when they write software and that this puts implicit assumptions into the software: the designers and therefore the software itself assumes that you’ll be doing things in a particular way… their way.
If you happen to think the same way the software does, you’ll find the software easy to use and if you don’t, you won’t.
Of course, if you do think the ‘right’ way for the software, you’ll have the advantage of finding things easy/intuitive, but you’ll also have the downside of being much less likely to produce something original (or even interesting!) as millions of other people will have done things just like it before you.
If you think differently you might find it easier to produce something original/interesting/effective but only at the cost of it being harder to produce anything at all in the first place. For me, there are some software packages that, when I use, I feel like I’m pushing an elephant up a hill.
That’s why I suggest to my clients that they don’t use electronic toys until well, well after they know what they want to say and how they want to say it – pencil and paper are about as easy to master as it gets; the advantage is that you can concentrate on what you want to capture, not on remembering how to capture it.
Let me give you an example, picking on Microsoft’s Word. Suppose I want to change the layout of the page from portrait to landscape. Where are the tools for doing this? They’re under the Files Menu as page setup. If you’ve been brought up on Word that probably makes sense to you out of sheer habit. But under the OpenOffice package you’d change the layout of a page under the Format Menu – in the same way as you’d change the format of a paragraph or a line, you’d just reformat a page. To me that’s more instinctively sensible.
No doubt there are other people who won’t think like me, of course! :)
I have the same preference for Apple’s Keynote software over Microsoft’s Powerpoint; it’s just more intuitive. Things are where I expect them to be and I don’t have to think about where a command might be; I just go where I’d put it if I was writing the software and there it is…
What are the advantages of this?
Picking on PowerPoint for an example: to insert a picture I have to INSERT/PICTURE/FROM FILE and then navigate to where I keep my pictures. To do the same in Keynote is a simple click/drag. Not only is it quicker in its own right but crucially it doesn’t interrupt my thought processes. The result is higher productivity. In all seriousness, I bought my first Mac laptop on something of a whim, despite it costing about £200 more than the equivalent Windows-based machine. I did some hard number-crunching with a spreadsheet a bit later and even if I charged my time stupidly cheaply, I figured that I’d got my £200 back in terms of extra productivity in a matter of weeks. Now that I know the Mac OS, or course, it would take even less…
Incidentally, this article started off life as me wanting to right something nice about Xmind – it’s free, open source and effective – a great way to draw MindMaps and so on to develop the structure of your presentation. (There is a paid-for ‘pro’ version but I’ve not needed it yet.
