I get that Randy probably intended for this to be confusingly organized, but he actually succeeded too well. It goes beyond being a convincing depiction of the nonsensical way he's organized his computer system and the comic just becomes hard to understand.
Most people in the Western world, which is where the majority of XKCD's audience lives, tend to read left to right and top to bottom. This means that most readers would read a contextless "supports" first, and like me, not realize it's meant to be a key. I learned it in seventh grade: you always label your keys when making a chart or graph or etc, just like you always label your axes. Also, the key shouldn't be in the top left, it should be available but nonintrusive in the top right, where the punchline is hanging out for some reason. The "Things I..." box should be moved to the bottom right, since it's meant to be the last thing the reader sees.
After the reader actually starts on the flowchart proper, they'll start at either "tool" or "updater", naturally pick the rightmost arrow on the latter, and end up at the dead end of "repository" a few arrows later. It's very counter-intuitively designed.
And when I'm done reading this I'm kinda just like "Okay, well, stop being shit at computers then." Maybe it's more relatable if you're a more techy person. Either way, it's a pretty lame joke made even worse by the presentation.
I mainly just feel bad for the people at explainxkcd that had to transcribe this.
No comments:
Post a Comment