The WHY Button
I can’t think of any relevant tags for this, and I’d like to think it’s because this is such a broadly applicable idea that it spans most categories.
The idea is this: many systems take inputs and produce outputs. Often, users of these systems would like to know WHY these systems produced these outputs.
I have two examples:
First, home automation. There’s a bunch of work on home automation and how it’s perceived, and one thing that comes across clearly is the frustration and unhappiness that users experience when the system acts in a way that isn’t what they expect.1
In response to this, it seems that the most obvious first step is to have a WHY button. In this case: why did you just turn all the lights off? Why is the thermostat cranked up to a hundred?
Second Example: programming, and more specifically debugging. This is a fairly obvious domain, and there’s already lots of work on time-travel debugging. The basic idea is the same: you have an outcome, it’s not the outcome you want, and you want to try to understand why. In this case, it’s not that we don’t know that we want a WHY button, it’s just really hard to implement.
In between these two extremes, there are lots of other examples. One of the one that gives me the most trouble is in system configuration. Why isn’t SpamAssassin running? (Should be not impossible.) Why is distnoted taking so much memory? (Harder.) Why does my mouse freeze whenever I hit a key in an xterm window behind VNC? (okay, that one is just a debugging question).
Actually, these last issues are interesting ones, because they dip into the space of “search”. That is, I would try to solve all of these last three by just using a search engine. At the moment, though, search doesn’t help me figure out why my program isn’t working (much) or why my lights aren’t on.
SO: what is it that makes the WHY button possible? In general, it appears to me that the answer is simply: declarative programming. When your program is written in a declarative language, it’s much more likely that you can get a good non-brain-bending “why” out of it.
Go, declarative languages!
Okay, now you can share all of the existing Human Interface research that already covers this topic.
Thanks!
1 : Brush, A. J., et al. “Home automation in the wild: challenges and opportunities.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011.