I imagine the following discussion will continue next week as we explore the impact videos games will have on our sites, yet Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think makes some important points as well as some “head-slappers” moments regarding the evolving human perspective on temporal issues.  I realized some time ago that for me personally a 25 year-old grad student, the metaphysical rules of the web simply make sense.  I have noticed that those of an even slightly older generation many times don’t possess the same comfort I have navigating around on computer programs and websites.  Why is this?  I was actually a late bloomer compared to my classmates during middle and high school.  In fact up until my junior year in High School, when a teacher asked for a paper to be typed, I assumed that she meant on a typewriter.

 

Yet once I bought my first computer my freshman year in college, I was able to explore all the features I was scared to try on publicly shared systems in high school, and found the usability was shockingly intuitive.  Does this intuitiveness derive from Bill Gates and Steve Job’s remarkably lucid user interfaces?  Possibly, but I think I have identified another source: video games.  The video game revolution was just kicking into high gear during my youth, and in fact interesting (or sad) as this may sound, I can’t remember a time previous to video games.  I should clarify that by video games I don’t mean arcade games, but rather home systems such as the Atari or Nintendo systems.  A crucial distinction I make between public and home-owned systems is the glorious (at least to me) power of the reset button. 

I remember quite vividly spending hours trying to beat “the computer” in Atari’s Football (so creative).  After years of playing the game you begin to learn the computer’s tendencies and patterns, and exploit them to your advantage.  After all the computer isn’t a thinking being (as opposed to what some might think) but instead a series of equations involving “what if” situations.  So let’s say you are in the midst of a particularly important game and you are winning quite handily.  Suddenly the computer seems to receive some unnatural breaks.  It starts out with an interception during a simple pass or a fumble during a run where you are positive no one has touched you.  Must be a weird quirk in the game, you think, someone didn’t program correctly before released from the manufacturer.  Slowly it dawns on you after your fifth fumble in as many possessions that the game is absolutely with out a doubt cheating!  How can this be?  It’s just a piece of junk with a bunch of math on it.  But nonetheless the cheating is real.  Gamers know all about what I am talking about, as we have all shared our traumatic stories, all because Football’s programmers simply wished to have a little fun in production.

Luckily as that child grows older, he or she begins to comprehend the power of the “reset” button, a line of thinking which I believe fully prepared me for the non-linear online world.  Think about it, the power to start all over again.  The power to go back.  It has actually been several years since I have spent significant time playing video games, but I can remember how liberating it was to know I could use the reset button whenever I sensed I was about to be cheated.  Let’s tie this into Krug’s book and web surfing.  As Krug noted, the “back” button accounts for 30-40% of clicks on the web.  That is a lot of restarting.  As designers and historians we must completely change our organizational outlook when creating an original piece of scholarship on the web.  Linear narratives can be incorporated in a site, but they can’t define the site.  As each user’s navigational habits appear to be unique, it would be foolish to cater to only certain types of thinking and searching.  Take a chance.  Give the user many paths to get to a link, or many options for finding information.  Luckily if she (or he) starts on a path that simply doesn’t make sense to her, rather than curse the website’s creator (programmer) she can retrace her steps to a point she is comfortable with.