Good Software For Human Beings -- The Secret Is Narrative

What is the secret to great software for human beings?  Not just any secret, but the secret?

The qualifier "for human beings" is an important caveat to this dramatic question -- because there is lots of great software which performs work not strictly for human beings.  For example, powerful mainframe software manages the insurance contracts for millions of insured people.  While the ultimate beneficiaries of such marvellous technology are human beings, the sorting and update and retrieval of these records could better be described as "for the organization".  Software "for human beings" implies software that is directly and specifically intended to augment the brain power of an individual human.  Examples of software "for human beings" include email clients, contact managers (CRM), personal information managers (PIMS), word processing etc., graphics editors.

The secret to great software for human beings is support for narrative.  Narrative, which is a more formal way of saying "story telling", is about the meaningful progression of events organized starting from a single point of view.  Stories can utlimately weave together many individual stories, but the building block of narrative has to be the story from one person's point of view.

Why is narrative so important to software intended for direct use by human beings?  Evidence is increasing from brain research that human brains are hard-wired for narrative understanding.  Based in part on amazing lab studies which show the brain "lighting up" in response to narrative stimuli, scientists speculate that narrative is the brain phenomenon whereby identity and a sense of self is created.  According to this research, everything else that humans do can be seen as being organized around core personal narratives. 

Your host first became acquainted with this research 10 years ago, when attending FOIS '01 (International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems -- http://www.formalontology.org/fois-2001/) where he heard Prof. Lawrence Barsalou's keynote address on "human conceptual systems".  It is intriguing to note  how ontology research and narrative research are related.  An interesting and current summary of research in this area can be found in at November 2010 New Scientist magazing article entitled Story Tellling 2.0: When new narratives meet old brains (http://bit.ly/aKjTMb).

What impact could our increasing understanding of brains and narrative have on software design?  Software works best when it is sympatico with the the way that human beings operate.  There is a huge upside for software builders who will be first to market with software that natively supports concepts of narrative, and for which the personal story is an organizing principle for the product.

Yes But Nassim Taleb Warns About Stories And Narrative . . .

Your host is reading Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan".  And one of the concerns of Dr. Taleb is how narrative invariably leads one astray.  It is possible that narrative is both important and misleading at the same time, which would make for an interesting and possibly fruitful contradiction.