The principles of intuitive design (25 Comment Mission)

Day 3,189, 18:00 • Published in USA USA • by Goddess Dilvany


I have in the last month started a new job where my employer operate on the principle its better to just leave Dylan alone and check in once and a while. Which allows me to avoid painful administration and email politics where you have to beg to get anything but the data entry job for the week, yuck! But why did I get this job, that pays more money that a 19yo would usually make? I showed that I have amazing intuition in solving the employers problems. A lot of people think I am a troll, a blowhard, contribute nothing to society, and even a complete retard. I have come to partially dispel these rumors and contribute something to eUSA.

Story Time Children
I remember back in high school junior year (now in my junior year of college) we were given a final assignment where we had to write an app. I made some sort of cool multiplayer game. (wasted too much time, that is a story for another time)

On the last day to complete the project my friend asked me to come over and help him on his project. I was so obsessed with my project that I really didn't pay attention to what he was doing. When I came over to the computer he told he that he was doing a Unicode converter and that he had problems with his code. I was in shock because I thought with almost a month of in class time and work at home something as simple as this would be done in one class period. I mean maybe two if you wanted to build a nice interface for the user.

If you are wonder what unicode is, did you ever hear that computers use ones and zeros like binary? So basically Unicode is the standard to which all characters are encoded so that the computer can tell what characters are.

here is a nice graphic


When I saw his code I almost yelled at my friend for being a complete retard. This is basically what he wrote.

Press Button Convert to Unicode:
if character = "!" then return 33
if character = "#" then return 35
.... etc you get the point


Now you may be thinking that sounds like a great approach to doing a converter. It checks what you sent it and then gives you its value that makes complete sense. Well common sense individual lets think back to a second ago when I said characters are stored as binary. Now what are numbers stored as? Binary, yes! So you can tell the computer to read the same binary as a character or a number with no trickery or insane magic just a common thing that you use often and are taught about pretty early on in computer science education. His code should literately just be.

Press Button Convert to Unicode:
return (int) character

You see this may seem simple enough when I broke it down to you, but consider this. You have to think like this, okay so there are these things called primitive data types that store data in a format that all of primitives can interpret. Character is a primitive and integer is a primitive. Despite me only being told that for the most part that you can use this to convert decimal numbers to integers, I will use this knowledge to convert the types. Add on top of it the additional context that comes with sitting down to actually write some computer code and you can get to one result. Humans are terrible at abstract thinking. I may be slightly better than my friend in this instance, but as a whole I and all of humanity are dog shit.

You mean nobody is as smart as they think?
My whole hypothesis on intelligence is that while some people are born smarter it is not really of that much significance on its own right. It is the ability of intuition compounded over a period of time that creates the sharp divides.

Well shit Ya Boi D Money what can I do?
Well there is two options you can accept that you were born with less of gods gifts as my mother would say about my English skills. Or you can try with variable success to just study intuition of more intelligent people. For example in highschool math they pretty much are just like MEH remember this shit for no reason except it does this one sort of useful trick that you wont need in the future because a year or two later you will actually learn a far superior method. If you get involved in a college level math program you will actually learn proofs for why the math is the way it is. You will actually get to see the amazing application of intuition that the person who discovered the proof and if you are paying attention and learn this then it will likely rub off on you. Overall the best way to really learn something is not to hook it up to your vanes, but to actually develop explanatory value out of the situation.

I hope you can appreciate this article not by giving money, but by supporting the censuring of Ya Boi D Money if you are in congress and leaving a comment I need to complete the mission. I wrote this article in honor of former Dicktator for life Yui, who is going to college for computer science and knows nothing about the topic. Good luck your going to need it! I did a poll for a paper I wrote of students who passed the freshman year computer science classes on the first try and the numbers were highly correlated with: did you know programming before hand?

Favorite Comment on the eUSA Forums


Great Links to Learn to Program
Hour of Code
Code Academy
App Inventor

Every comment will get a response translated in my computer generated language!