4 ms·

"""The interfaces require the end-user to know about the concept of a table, rows and columns, the concept of logical expressions, as well as aggregation, even

"""The interfaces require the end-user to know about the concept of a table, rows and columns, the concept of logical expressions, as well as aggregation, even though none of those are directly visible nor have a ‘real life’ analog.""" This sentence expresses the problem I see with designers. Instead of making that disappear into magic why not focus on actually purposely and clearly educating people about these CORE concepts? edit: Think of how you would do this if you were Khan academy...

joe_the_user 12y ago
Instead of making that disappear into magic why not focus on actually purposely and clearly educating people about these CORE concepts? Because "people are dumb"? Well, people aren't dumb-dumb but just as you aren't going to get everyone to code, you aren't going to get everyone to understand abstract logical relations (not generally, throughout society, though anything is possible in a single enterprise). Spreadsheet maintain their dominance in places that they logically don't belong because you will always have a person who got their position, in say a brokerage firm, through social intelligence, language intelligence or "sheer guts". And they will want to be able to manipulate data without training and spreadsheets let them. Heck, we can't replace the Excell interface with a better spreadsheet interface.
- hammerandtongs 12y ago
  The goal isn't teaching everyone. It's to teach the very limited subset of business analysts that CARE about the answer to learn their tools well enough to ask the question properly. Generally I think we are seeing some of these things should probably be part of much earlier math education. Sets, predicate logic in 7-8th grade?
ethanbond 12y ago
The pragmatic reason is that it takes a lot of time. As a product designer at a company that actually tackles exactly this problem, we generally have approximately 0ms to stop a user's workflow in order to teach them a cool concept. Building intuition DURING their workflow is where things get really exciting for designers though. Edit: Should point out that I'm not quite sure if you're suggesting we teach this in school, or...? But I read this as a designer's job to teach this in-product.
- hammerandtongs 12y ago
  0ms is a good goal for calling lyft or uber. It's probably not a great goal for coherently querying data in a flexible and powerful way. Having very little friction when your user has attained some fluency is a great goal however.
misterdata 12y ago
Author here. I agree with your remark but it simply isn't reality. Another issue is that while users may be aware of the core concepts, they are applied differently between applications (e.g. a relationship in Excel between tables is based on a VLOOKUP formula whereas in SQL it is a JOIN or carthesian product). I do think data tools can educate users, just like a spreadsheet interface teaches its users about the concept of formulas and relationships between cells.
- hammerandtongs 12y ago
  It "isn't reality" because it's a very hard problem that hasn't been well solved. That should intimidate you enough to take it seriously but not to keep you from trying. While the concepts are similar the brittleness and bad design of spreadsheets (as I say elsewhere in the thread they should have had tables as first class object from day one) limits the ability to really make them a sane solution. That being said, spreadsheets (some running hedge funds) are a testament that the core concepts are learnable.

joe_the_user 12y ago

Instead of making that disappear into magic why not focus on actually purposely and clearly educating people about these CORE concepts? Because "people are dumb"? Well, people aren't dumb-dumb but just as you aren't going to get everyone to code, you aren't going to get everyone to understand abstract logical relations (not generally, throughout society, though anything is possible in a single enterprise). Spreadsheet maintain their dominance in places that they logically don't belong because you will always have a person who got their position, in say a brokerage firm, through social intelligence, language intelligence or "sheer guts". And they will want to be able to manipulate data without training and spreadsheets let them. Heck, we can't replace the Excell interface with a better spreadsheet interface.

hammerandtongs 12y ago
The goal isn't teaching everyone. It's to teach the very limited subset of business analysts that CARE about the answer to learn their tools well enough to ask the question properly. Generally I think we are seeing some of these things should probably be part of much earlier math education. Sets, predicate logic in 7-8th grade?

ethanbond 12y ago

The pragmatic reason is that it takes a lot of time. As a product designer at a company that actually tackles exactly this problem, we generally have approximately 0ms to stop a user's workflow in order to teach them a cool concept. Building intuition DURING their workflow is where things get really exciting for designers though. Edit: Should point out that I'm not quite sure if you're suggesting we teach this in school, or...? But I read this as a designer's job to teach this in-product.

hammerandtongs 12y ago
0ms is a good goal for calling lyft or uber. It's probably not a great goal for coherently querying data in a flexible and powerful way. Having very little friction when your user has attained some fluency is a great goal however.

misterdata 12y ago

Author here. I agree with your remark but it simply isn't reality. Another issue is that while users may be aware of the core concepts, they are applied differently between applications (e.g. a relationship in Excel between tables is based on a VLOOKUP formula whereas in SQL it is a JOIN or carthesian product). I do think data tools can educate users, just like a spreadsheet interface teaches its users about the concept of formulas and relationships between cells.

hammerandtongs 12y ago
It "isn't reality" because it's a very hard problem that hasn't been well solved. That should intimidate you enough to take it seriously but not to keep you from trying. While the concepts are similar the brittleness and bad design of spreadsheets (as I say elsewhere in the thread they should have had tables as first class object from day one) limits the ability to really make them a sane solution. That being said, spreadsheets (some running hedge funds) are a testament that the core concepts are learnable.