Re: [saag] The Mathematical Mesh

[Ben Laurie <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, 24 Apr 2019 at 18:49, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> The reason that the World Wide Web exists at all is that Tim Berners-Lee
> ignored the sage advice of the hypertext community that referential
> transparency was essential and pressed ahead with 'scruffy links'. Nobody
> did usability testing to decide whether the gopher or Web UI was the
> approach to follow until long after we knew the answer.
>

This is a clear case of survivorship bias. The users did the usability
testing. WWW survived (despite being technically terrible in many ways),
the competitors did not.



> My criticism of usability testing is this: we do not find out if buildings
> will stay up by building them and seeing if they fall down. That is exactly
> how it was done in the past which is why the Bent Pyramid collapsed during
> construction.
>
> Usability testing is the scientific approach. We should have moved past
> science and started practicing engineering. We should be able to predict
> with some confidence how users will react by applying principles learned
> from individual tests.
>

Indeed, somewhat possible.

Some classes of usability failure are quite easy to analyze. If a user
> faces two potential situations, case A and case B where one will lead to
> disaster and the other will perform the intended task and has no means of
> distinguishing these cases, the product is defective.
>
> Right now, I have no means of knowing if an email from my bank is actually
> an email from my bank or not. And that should be considered a problem. The
> problem I have with discussions of usability is that the argument is made
> that because we might not be able to serve every user we should just give
> up and never try to change anything.
>

Well, the problem I have with discussions of usability is the argument is
made that we should leave that until all the tech is figured out, or that
we don't need to bother because the thing is obviously better. Going from
.1% to 1% is clearly an improvement, but it is not a solution.

BTW, my original question was not about QR codes (though I have my doubts
about those), but about this assertion about usability: "Otherwise, there
are many existing protocols that make comparison of 15-30 character base 32
encoded strings as the basis for mutual authentication and these have
proved effective and acceptable."


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