www.btinternet.com/~adrian.larner/review/nardi
A Small Matter of Programming
Bonnie A Nardi
MIT Press, 1993, 162pp, hardbound,
£29.95
ISBN 0 262 14053 5
A Review by Adrian Larner for the Computer Journal
In 1979, Bonnie Nardi tells us, she spent several months in Papua New Guinea and came back with an account of how its villagers communicated with slit-gongs. This book is her account of what she has learned in several years of studying the communications of another exotic folk: users of application software packages. The burden of Nardi’s account concerns the amazing ability of these people to master formal systems and notations, and the ways in which they co-operate with each other in their spreadsheeting and computer assisted design.
These topics are – or ought to be – of vital interest to the designers of software packages. But plenty of advice on usability has already been proffered to the designer (and, judging by her extensive list of references, read by Nardi). Is there any reason why we should welcome yet one more (blessedly slim) volume?
This was my second book review for the Computer Journal, and my first glowing review: a real delight to find a writer on the Human Computer Interface that recognised on which side of that interface most of the intelligence is to be found.
Nardi on ordinary people’s mastery of formal symbolisms reminded me of my mother expressing her mystification at my esoteric programming skills while herself effortlessly interpreting a knitting pattern of mind-boggling complexity.
There is every reason. Nardi is a natural historian of humanity, with acute powers of observation and analysis, and – which is even rarer – the ability to marshal evidence and conduct argument. In her discussions of the mundane human conversation as a model of the human/computer interface, and of a variety of interaction techniques, she wields the blade of reason so courteously and delicately that even those whose ideas have been cut to size, or given an elegant coup de grace, could scarcely complain at the treatment. But between these discussions comes Nardi’s major achievement: a beautifully sustained and forceful argument that ordinary human beings can master formal systems, and even special notations. Now recall all those other approaches to usability, including not a few among the writings of the Artificial Intelligentsia, that start from a presupposition (rarely evidence or argument) to the contrary.
We are offered here a collection of well founded and immediately applicable advice by a skilled advocate of the user. While most of that usability literature may safely be left on the shelf, the package designer that does not now read Nardi will be without excuse.
Copyright © 1994, 2001 Adrian Larner. The author asserts all moral rights.
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