Do I Trust This Computer?
Waiting in line recently, getting a burrito for lunch, my new watch asked out of the blue: “Trust This Computer?”
And it didn’t just ask, it buzzed my wrist.
My first thought was “Don’t bother me, I’m getting a burrito.” But then it sunk in. “What computer?” Did it mean my computer? Back on my desk? Miles away? Or did it mean that laptop over on that corner table of the restaurant, with the guy looking like he could be typing commands in a Terminal to hack a watch?
I had no idea.
The thing is, after all these years, our trusted devices don’t always behave very trustworthy. I’m not talking about security or privacy here. I’m hoping my watch was only asking to connect with my phone in my pocket. The trust I’m talking about is more about how our devices behave, and how they often frustrate and make us feel dumb.
Why did my watch need to ask such a worrisome question at such an odd time? And why was it calling my phone a computer? It certainly didn’t help me understand what it was asking.
I’m a software developer (or so I tell people). I use computers and devices all day long, and I still struggle finding and using certain things on my phone or iPad more often than I’d like.
Why, for example, are the camera controls always moving around and changing on my phone with each new update? Is that really necessary?
Gestures on the iPad have been driving me a little crazy, lately, too. It seems like I’m always causing something to happen when I touch the screen that I didn’t mean to happen, getting stuck in some state I don’t know how to get out of. Also, how many different ways will Apple come with to set a bookmark or exit a book in the Books app? The exit button has moved recently, and I’m always reaching for the wrong corner of the screen, now. (It has made me realize, though, just how much muscle memory is a part of a user experience.)
The Apple TV is another example. It has become the way we watch most of our TV and movies in our household, now. There are a lot of really nice things to like about it. Except why does it keep wanting me to subscribe to the Paramount+ “channel,” every time I try to watch Stephen Colbert, when I already have a paid subscription to the Paramount+ “app”? Why, exactly, is there a “channel” and an “app” that have their own subscpritons? More importantly, why doesn’t my Apple TV already know which one I use and pay for?
Then there are the times when I have to force-quit a TV app to get it to load again. Apple’s “Movies” app, for example, likes to freeze up on the spinner a lot, and never recover. I’m not sure anyone should (or would) ever know they need to force-quit an app… on their TV.
Living on the Edge
My guess is that all of us software developers should start respecting our edge cases again—those dark corners of our apps where bugs hide and cause our users real pain and mistrust. Those areas we keep telling ourselves won’t be bothering enough people to justify taking time away from building new features. Which, of course, introduce their own new edge cases and new bugs, causing more pain and mistrust.
Maybe, instead of putting ourselves through endless sprints of new features, we focus again on some of that tech debt that keeps piling up around things like handling network delays and errors better, fixing those troublesome concurrency issues, and really giving designers, developers, and particularly QA the time they need to test and solidify the features that are already there.
The apps we create can only become trustworthy for our users if we take the time and effort to make them work in dependable, consistent, and predictable ways.
So do I trust this computer? That’s hard to say. I do know we could be doing a lot more to make the software on our trusted devices behave in ways that are more worthy of our trust—or at least not having them ask us scary questions while buying a burrito.