Just read Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-Mail Overload.. Hurst is one of the founders of Creative Good, a user experience group which we have been members of for several years. Bit Literacy is an easy, short-flight read. Also has a web site, with sample chapters. This book contains lots of good ideas about making your use of computing more efficient. It seeks to increase your 'bit literacy', improving your computing experience, in useful ways. I do wonder about the practicality of some of his proposals, which exist in the realm of 'wouldn't it be nice if we all ...'.
The first, and what will seem the most radical to many is his proposal that we should completely empty our email in boxes every day. Deleting, filing or placing each message in a todo list. He also describes some novel ways of using todo lists, using the package Gootodo, which he claims is the only 'complete' todo package. I would like to see my email inbox completely empty someday, he suggests it's an almost spiritual experience. I have not seen an empty in box for a very long time.
He makes a good case for minimizing the use of e-mail attachments, says we should include all text in the body of an e-mail , and suggests that we should rarely use packages like Word, and stick with plain ASCII, where the text you see is exactly what is in the file. No fonts, no advanced formatting. I admire his view, but I think that train has left the station some time ago.
His company has every candidate take a typing test, and believes that fast, touch typing is important. He goes a step further and suggests we should be using the more efficient DVORAK keyboard arrangement, rather than the near-universal QWERTY. Some packages allow you to switch arrangements with an easy parameter setting. Probably most relevant for those that do lots of typing, and I think you would get quite a bit of resistance for the re-training required. My own 'modified-peek' touch typing', last measured at about 25 wpm in high school, serves me reasonably well.
I did like his ideas about file naming and maintenance, we could all do with a bit of better machine organization, making it easier to find things and minimize the number of keystrokes to get things to happen. He is not a fan of the mouse, and suggests we should do many things with 'bit levers', key strokes that implement words or phrases. He praises simplicity and order in messaging style, meriting an 'Elements of Style' comparison. I wish he would have done more in depth here.
The last part of the book gets into what I would call literacy rather than advocacy, he does a good job describing some of the things all computer users should know about files, folders, extensions and the like. He overviews Windows and Macs, but prefers Macs, which are the standard for his company. He outlines how his company uses these methods.
Hurst has thought much about the user experience of the personal computer and comes up with some thoughtful ideas. Not a revolutionary book by any means. I like Brian Schwartz's back cover comment that we have all learned our computing style piecemeal , this book starts to bring some of that together. How would new employees react to a 'Bit Literacy' class to establish a base of common usage?
Recommended for those that want to think about what current computer experience is all about.
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