Users and Users

I ended up this week in a discussion about new machines in a training room. It was one of those meetings where everyone wants things to be as simple as possible but nobody really has thought about the complexity of the situation. The idea had been mooted that we should use virtual machines for those applications that did not run on the managed desktop and instead the desktop would link to the virtual machines.

Well it sounds great, an automatic role back of files and such, not having unsecure machines and lots more, lets be honest if it would work it would be a good solution. However what does work mean?

Here I need to express my stance, which is basically I want users to be able to run SPSS and NVivo on these machines as the room is the one where I teach the majority of courses in.

There is first the technical difficulties, I am somewhat cautious over whether NVivo would run in a virtual environment although it did for a while run on virtual windows environments when running on a Mac. With SPSS I envisage NO problems whatsoever. In other words as far as can we technically do this, I need persuasion whether NVivo would run (it is notoriously difficult to run in non-standard settings) but do not see other problems.

However these pale into insignificance when we start looking at user using the system. Many of the people in my department tend to think that the world is made up of people like us. That is not to say all of us are wizards on the computers, some are, but most of us are just what I would call proficient users who are able to use computers pretty well to carry out our own personal jobs. The wizards need to be wizards to carry out their jobs. However that means that in our day to day experience we are not working with a large portion of the population and these people really do not trust computers. The closest I can get to the feeling I get from them is they suspect computers of being the sort of sly operator, who lulls you into thinking you are doing all right and then pulls a fast one on you. Therefore they do not trust whatever they do on computers and if ANYTHING changes they freeze in an instant state of panic.

Now imagine if you run a virtual machine in front of just such a person, what do you get. Well you have two start buttons just to begin with, not just that but two filestore systems and the second one has a different c: drive to the first one. This is not supposed to happen. I can see people having problems with not knowing how to get to the second start button.

What I am not saying is these people are stupid, many of them are far from that, and have degrees to prove it. That is why I  characterize it as a lack of trust that undermines all their understanding, in the end they do not trust themselves to work with the machine and for it to give consistent outcomes. This group of people are diminishing as people grow up with using computers, or at least the stage that this begins. When I first came twenty years ago I quite literally started SPSS courses explaining how to use a computer mouse! They are not extinct and I suspect will not be extinct in my life time.

The problem with NVivo is that it is a powerful package (what it does is quite complex) that is targeted at a particular group that has a high propensity towards this freezing. These are the people who read books rather than played with computers as kids! There are more maths-phobes among them than the population in general and maths-phobes seem to often link with this group of people. These are people who have chosen to do Qualitative Analysis and often part of that reasoning is because they found Quantitative scary! They just lump computers into the "scary" category as well.

Whatever I do I have not to give extra hurdles between these people and the using of the software. They need to feel they are in control and "difficult" things is not a good place to start.