Alan Cooper wrote an article called "Your Program's Posture" that classified software programs into four main categories based on how they interact with the user: sovereign, transient, daemonic and parasitic. Our assignment this week for our Digital History class is to "make a list of all of the software that you interact with during a typical historical research process and classify it according to Cooper’s scheme."
I am not a computer person, so the programs I use to write a research paper are pretty standard. I use a library catalogue to search for books and the electronic journal storage, such as JSTOR, and electronic finding aids for archival sources to search for primary and secondary sources. None of these quite fit into Cooper's categories, although the recently discovered Zotero program might be considered a "transient" program as it is a tool that appears at the bottom of the screen and can disappear again when you no longer need it. I use Microsoft Word to write my paper or Microsoft PowerPoint to create a presentation of my research, both of which I believe would be considered sovereign programs as both dominate the page and are continuously used. I can not think of parasitic or daemonic programs that are running that I am aware of, though as I said, I know very little about what happens 'behind the scenes' as it were.
Software usability issues enter into the historians craft when they are trying to communicate that history to the public in digital form. Most people are able to use programs such as Word to hand in a research paper. Less people know how to programme a website to display the results of that research. What could be improved, if digital is (as it seems to be) the way of the future, is to create "humanities-friendly" programs. There are templates and easy, helpful guides to programs like PowerPoint, why can there not be more formulated programs for the not-so-computer-savvy historian? I recognize the importance of developing newer, faster, more interesting programs, but I also think that more time needs to be spent developing programs for ease of use, so that there are more sovereign programs available for humanity-type research to be displayed on the internet.
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One of the annoying things about designing applications is that it's often harder to design an intuitive and easy-to-learn interface (or write good documentation for less intuitive ones) than it is to implement a complex, powerful and useful program itself. Effective interfaces for a program that does more than one or two things are hard to design, which is why you usually don't see them in newer, independently-produced stuff despite its niftiness.
I'm fiddling with an efficient, incredibly powerful set of graphics software that does for free what normally costs tens of thousands of dollars right now, but it took me months to figure out how to become somewhat adept in it. I can show others how to use it in much much much much less time, but that's because the learning process is recent enough for me that I remember it. The documentation for it, produced by the designers, might as well be Linear A in places. It's a problem with a lot of powerful software in general, and is far from discipline-specific.
It's a pretty constant source of friction in a lot of communities which are involved with developing software. There's a joke in CS fields that says "user-friendly" and "programmer-hostile" are often synonymous. That's true, but it doesn't excuse the results; there definitely needs to be more work put on ease of use, or at least documentation, for a lot of the stuff out there, because otherwise it's going to remain obscure.
thanks for the comment, patrick! i'm glad that my point got across. It is nice to know that there are people like you who bridge the gap between users, interfaces, and programs and are aware of the drawbacks to these otherwise really neat applications.
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