Haystack Blog

I’m composing the first of what I hope will be many posts describing information tasks that should be easy (ideally, point-and-click easy) but instead seem to be very hard (requiring programming). I post these in the hope of

finding out about tools that do make these tasks easy, or
fomenting thought about why these tasks are [...]

In 1981, Elaine Rich predicted in a paper called “Users are individuals” [1] that as digital information tools became increasingly capable, they would empower people to assume more tasks and responsibilities. This tendency would, in turn, drive a demand for better tools — tools that let people complete their tasks more easily, efficiently and [...]