[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
You claim to understand that people use computers in different ways. This is a different thing from actually understanding it…In this case, you are ignoring that speed is often more useful to humans than pin-point precision. Humans can easily select almost without thinking the correct information from a list. Getting the right information exactly on the first try is much harder.
[/quote]
First, let me reiterate that I was going for teh snark, so my post was somewhat coarse and over-inflated.
More to the point you raise, however, is that understanding the issue of how computers work vs. how humans use them is only the precursor to implementing a solution. And that understanding, IME, is unfortunately usually only appreciated on one side of the user/programmer equation. Let me give you an anecdote as an illustration:
I was a grad student not too long ago, working with an “intelligent” robot that interacted in real time with people. Mobility, vision processing, natural language, emotive responses…the whole shebang. (As I said, I’m an AI guy.) My advisor, very much into cognitive studies, had a philosophy professor in the lab one evening to see a demo, with the hope of collaborating at some point in the future.
After seeing the robot do it’s thing (with a couple of glitches), conversation turns to ontologies and classification hierarchies. At some point, the prof says to my advisor, “Well, that’s easy. Just have the robot do X when it sees a face that looks angry.” At which point, my advisor and I stole a glance at one another, each shaking our heads in his utter ignorance of the enormity of the problem.
Now, in no way, shape, or form am I equating Otto’s narrowed search results to full-on AI problems. But the underlying issue is similar – end users too often have no fucking clue just how difficult or time consuming it is to make a system work, much less be pleasant to use. But somehow, end-users expect computers to magically work like humans (“Stupid computer…of course ‘Bob’ is short for ‘Robert’! How could it not know that?!” Hmmm. Perhaps because that’s not the way symbol processing computers works?).
Add in the time and money constraints, pressure from the (often ignorant) higher-ups, and requirements/specifications that are unknown and unseen by the end-user, and it becomes obvious which party is most likely not to understand the issue (or, at least, the full scope of the issue). Hint: it’s not the one implementing the system.
As I said, I’m actually pretty [sy|e]mpathetic to Otto’s plight. Too often, the Nick Burns of the IT world not only do shitty design, but they also refuse to see any problem where one exists. And that’s inexcusable. But, given the totality of end-user needs and system implementation, it’s prima facie false to say that they are more ingnorant than an end-user. They’ve obviously at least thought about the interface (having implemented it); there’s no way the average end-user can know anything about the implementation.
On a more helpful note for Otto, if there’s any way to submit a feature request, I’d suggest doing so…perhaps mentioning to a manager, “Y’know, it would make my job a lot quicker and easier if this search functionality was put back.” Although I’d leave out the “fucktard” and “brain farting knuckle programmer” bits for best results.