Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Engaging with incomplete or poorly functioning technology can be frustrating and unproductive for users.
Douglas Adams highlights the disparity between the excitement that tech enthusiasts feel when experimenting with new technologies and the frustration that end users experience when those technologies fail to function properly. He suggests that the joy derived from tinkering with technology is not always matched by its practical application and usability for the average user.
Themes
TechnologyUsersFrustrationEnthusiasmInnovation
In practice
Example use cases
During a tech conference, while discussing software development, I might use this quote to illustrate the challenges of user experience.
More from Douglas Adams
All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
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Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
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Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
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What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
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We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
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