n the early '50s, J.R.R. Tolkien took the floor at a meeting of a venerable Oxford religious-cultural society, to read from the manuscript of his new work,
The Lord of the Rings
. As Tolkien launched into the tale of Frodo the Hobbit, his colleague C.S. Lewis groaned in a kind of stage-whisper, "Not another f---ing e
lf!"
This phrase springs to mind often, every time we run into one of those supernatural creatures that haunt PC software. These wizards and their ilk pop out all over the place, pretending to be friendly, claiming to know better than we mortals what we want to do, and offering to help us do it.
Beware. Nine times out of 10, trusting a wizard brings you grief in the end.
Set aside the question of whether you want a magic wand waving you on as you write that letter to Mom, figure out whether you can afford another child, present bad news to the boss, or determine your investment priorities (these are all real examples, folks). Say you only call on a wizard when there's a straightforward job that you don't feel competent to do on your own-perhaps laying out a newsletter or adding the bit of programming to connect a GUI button to an E-mail widget.
You click through a couple of whimsical graphics, you answer a bunch of questions, make a couple of choices, and voilá-the wizard comes up with
something for you. It may not be exactly what you would have done on your own, but you'd better decide you like it. You don't want to cross a wizard.
Don't try to modify or diverge from anything created via wizardry. You'll find yourself in that awful netherworld where you don't know where you are, how you got there, or how to get out. All you can do is start over, but often a wizard will leave behind a trail of mischievous defaults that are almost impossible to track down and eradicate.
Wizards are an anthropomorphized (and all the more annoying for it) version of the fictions that underlie nearly all software. These fictions hide complexity, bridge incompatibilities, smooth over inelegance, and impose metaphors that are usually helpful but seldom perfect. "Desktops" are fiction. Network "bulletin boards" are fiction. "Templates" are fiction. Like all simulations, they tend to break down if pushed too far. When something you've cut-and-pasted shows up at six times its original size, or when a font in
explicably changes to some odd default, chances are you've fallen into a simulation gap.
Windows 95's wobbly support for long file names is a clear case of a skin-deep fiction fraying as it moves out of its home environment.
The more elaborate these simulations get, the greater their downside potential. Recovering from a failed fiction requires an enormous amount of work. You have to figure out the conventions by which the simulation operates, figure out the problem being simulated, figure out how one maps against the other, and then work backward to implement a fix.
Wizards are particularly guilty of rushing through a task with superficial "magic" instead of trying to come up with a thorough, consistent way of modeling it. Wizards are usually not part of the original product design, but are last-minute patches added to make awkward parts of the program look more streamlined. When a few options trigger a huge amount of hidden programming, you're on shaky ground.
Manufacturers of PC packages s
eem to think that wider audiences demand cuter gimmicks and more brainless shortcuts. But the current plague of incompetent wizards only makes their software seem frustrating and mystifying, if not downright malevolent.
John Tibbetts and Barbara Bernstein are partners in Kinexis,
a San Francisco consulting firm. You can visit them at their Web site at
www.kinexis.com
.
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n the early '50s, J.R.R. Tolkien took the floor at a meeting of a venerable Oxford religious-cultural society, to read from the manuscript of his new work,
The Lord of the Rings
. As Tolkien launched into the tale of Frodo the Hobbit, his colleague C.S. Lewis groaned in a kind of stage-whisper, "Not another f---ing e
lf!"
