Cognitive Overhead

Today's LinkedIn news trawl turned up one article that's well worth my while to remember, on Cognitive Overhead.

The heart of the point is that everybody *talks* about simplicity in product design nowadays, but we often don't understand what that means. There's often a focus on smaller, faster, with fewer controls, but that's not really the important part. The essence of true simplicity is how easy it is for somebody to *grok* your product: to understand what they can and should be doing with it, and how to make it do what it's supposed to.

This is going to be Querki's biggest challenge. I know what Querki is supposed to do, and I'm reasonably sure that I can build it. But getting to the point where the typical Internet user can pick it up and start doing things with it -- *that* is going to be an epic project, and I suspect it'll take several years to get to the point where it's adequate. I've got a lot of ideas in various directions, ranging from how naive users will get into the system in the first place (one of the many reasons to focus on App development), to how we build a UI that makes sense to folks, to simply how we *describe* the tool to the public. But I expect all of those are going to need tons of tweaking and tuning (and often throwing out and starting again) to get it right...

Tablero -- the origin

Folks in the SCA games community will probably appreciate this bit. I just stumbled across this page:

http://superfluidity.tumblr.com/post/1120590241/a-godly-game-which-rewardeth-forbearence-and-punisheth

While it doesn't call it by name, it's clearly talking about the invention of Tablero de Jesus. Seems to fit the facts as previously established, and it sounds like the author of the game (apparently named Peter Swift, from the links) had nothing to do with the SCA. That's comforting.

Context, for those coming newly into this: Tablero de Jesus is one of the most popular games in the SCA; the drinking-game variation, Tablero da Gucci, is often called the national game of An Tir. We always believed it was period, but some years back, in a conversation with Thierry Depaulis, I was thoroughly disabused of that notion -- the documentation turned out to be utter nonsense if you actually dug into it. (The moral of the story is that just because something is documented doesn't mean it is *true*. Documentation has to be substantiated.) Our conclusion was that the game pretty much had to be a deliberate hoax.

Ever since then I've been wondering who came up with the hoax, so it's good to finally get a *little* closure on that. I was just reading the story of When Dickens Met Dostoevsky, which is a tale of truly *epic* hoaxing and sock-puppetry (long, but worth the read), and was reminded to try a little surfing, and came across this little confession. (And yes, I've made a copy of the article for posterity, in case the author of the blog follows through with his threat to take the story down...)