When Applications are Smarter Than I Am

Well, there was a time. There was a time when people who knew about computers were able to use one. And all the others weren’t. But then came Excel.

Excel is one of the few programmes that believe to be more clever than the people using it. So as, when I try to enter a value span of, let’s say, “10-12″, meaning “ten to twelve” as in “ten to twelve hours to finish this task”, in a cell, Excel is pretty sure that I am meaning to say “10 December”. And, honestly, noone in a German-speaking country ever meant the tenth of december when writing “10-12″; that’s just not our way to write dates.

Anyway, Excel. While they do offer means of explicitly formatting a cell to a literal (what we developers would call “String”) value, my “10-12″ would transform to 40887. Which is, …, well, not what I was trying to enter into the cell at the first place.

Excel thus believes it is smarter than me. A user interface which is programmed to be better than the person using it. So is the iOS Autocorrect-Feature (“No, ye ain’t writin’ the right thing although you’ve tried to correct it twice”), and even Google (“No, ye ain’t typing the right words, so I am using my fuzzy search to display you some of the less relevant results instead”).

Why? Shouldn’t a programm be built to serve the user? Of course, that is hard to do. Respecting the fact, that, in Excel’s and Google’s and iOS’s native countries, they are probably behaving correctly – I guess it wouldn’t be such a hard thing to recognize that a user has replaced the 40887-Auto-Cell-Format-Value into the original text more than four times in only one spreadsheet? I mean, c’mon!

What am I trying to say with this entry? Not that Excel is a piece of crap (which it is, honestly, not; neither are Google ore iOS). But, your apps being so smart, why don’t you build a mechanism to identify whether or not your user is smart, and then adapt your UI and the application’s behaviour accordingly?