Second Quarter Changes

A concept that was finally made brutally clear during the second quarter of deployment^4.7 is the idea that whenever possible the tool should enhance and enable existing usage. A primary example of this are the ideas of a spreadsheet and email. Both can used in ways that are very similar to existing usage paradigms. A spreadsheet can be used for double-entry bookkeeping in a way that is almost exactly the same as bookkeepers would do by hand, but enables greater usability through automation. Email, similarly, works under exactly the same paradigms as mail service in the physical world^4.8, but enables much more rapid delivery, multiple recipients, and other features. This notion of being an enabling technology under existing paradigms is powerful, since it allows users to leverage existing models of understanding when confronting the program for the first time. Forcing a user to not only learn a new tool but also an entirely foreign paradigm for completing a task will cause undue stress on the user and great resistance to adoption.

A related design point that was only made clear after many cycles of development and deployment is the fact that a system like Agar has little similarity to any common programs. It is not a browser, a shell, a word processor, or a spreadsheet. The users of the system will simply have no initial mental model of the system, so if the program model is not obvious, the discrepancy between these models will cause some stress on the user and will become a great barrier to adoption^4.9.