Someone gave my seven year old daughter a watch recently - did you know they don’t teach reading a clock face at school any more?

So I have spent the morning teaching her how to read it. The analogue watch face is a great example of designing an interface around the technology rather than designing the technology around the interface - the mechanism transfers electrical or mechanical energy through cogs and gears to move a couple of indicators in a circular pattern at a defined speed. Against this, a gradated scale is marked and we are taught how to interpret this information.

The problem is that the interface doesn’t fit the brief. Humans translate time as hours and minutes, minutes to hours and minutes past hours as well as proportionally - quarter past the hour for example.

This requires three skills of the user - understanding fractions (interpreting quarter past for example), recognising different contexts (the number two is either a two or a ten for example) and mental arithmetic (to multiply the hour by five to give the minutes).

Reading the hours is relatively straight forward - which number is it closest to, although this introduces an element of judgement, which two people will likely perceive differently.

Consider the digital watch - time is presented in the hours and minutes format and requires the user to recognise only the numbers and their order. The watch has been developed to compute the time and display it in this format.

The upshot of this is that as developers and users, we are guilty of the same processes, especially in OSS. We frequently identify needs and produce efficient technical solutions while neglecting that we understand how it works while the user may not. We are the watchmakers.