#35-The Principle of the Useful Illusion Part 2

How does this principle apply to the notion of an agile process?  I think it fundamentally changes the way we create automation, and the value that automation ultimately provides.  This week I explain why.

Transcript

Last week I exposed you to the notion that computers cannot add, or do anything really, and that the fact that they appear to do many things is an illusion.  Why did I bring this up, and how does it relate to agile?

This point of view can change what we create, but it can also change how we create it.  If I hold as a fundamental truth the notion that software is only real when it is used, then naturally part of creating it will be getting a user to use it.  Agile development processes mandate this: I must get features validated as early and as frequently as possible along the way, to allow me to adjust what I am doing without excessive waste. 

Agility proponents have many good reasons for this, but here we have discovered another, supportive point of view:

I have not actually made anything until a user has tried out my system, because it does not actually exist until it is in use.  

Part of making something is getting a user to use it, and thus to validate that it is what they actually need.

I also think that considering the use of a system to be its only value will tend to make me consider the usability of that system earlier in its design.  I know that there is a lot of automation that I use, every day, that could be much easier to use in terms of where things are on menus, how options are arranged, how functions interact with each other, and so forth.  If the designers of those products had asked me, as the user, where to put things and how they should work, I guarantee the applications would be significantly different.

I also submit that they would be better, if we believe that the use of a system is the only point of the system.  As the user my perspective would therefore be considered paramount.  In his terribly interesting and useful book "The Design of Everyday Things", Donald Norman explored this notion: if things are hard to use properly, the fault is in the design, not in the user, because the design has failed to match the expectations and the natural use that the user will try to put the device to.  The value of the device lies purely in the use it can be put to; therefore, a design that cannot be used, or used well, has failed to some degree.

As I wrote this, and as I recorded and edited it, I made use of a computer running software.  I struck keys and watched as "characters" "appeared" on the "page". I "recorded" it with a microphone into a "file", which I edited by cutting out noise and mistakes by moving my mouse and "clicking on icons". None of this actually happened, of course.  It is all in my mind, in the expectations I have and how the things I see match those expectations.  

You, when you read or listen to this, will be separated in time and in space from me.  We will likely never meet, and so the notion that "I will communicate to you" is a fiction.  The truth is, I am causing an arrangement of magnets to line up in a certain way.  Hopefully as you later view this arrangement you will think about something that is similar to what I am thinking about now.  The communication is purely an illusion.

Hopefully, it will be a useful one.