In this blog I discuss At the Interface: The Case of the Electric Push Button, 1880–1923 (JSTOR, 2012).

When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked

At first glance, this article sounded hackneyed. The familiar story of silly old-time luddites fearing machines when they didn’t even know what was coming.

At the turn of the century, the electric push button offered a seamless, effortless customer experience for lighting, elevators, radios and more by covering up the inner workings of a small circuit with a cute, protruding interface.

But it’s less that people were “freaked”, and rather, more so concerned about loss of knowledge. A 1916 educator lamented that the push button was not so humble indeed, and instead relieved people “of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”

The full paper raises some still relevant questions about the implications of even the most unremarkable interfaces which abstract the inner workings of complicated things so we can live life user-friendly.

Do we miss out on invaluable knowledge from not being able to build or conceptualize a system ourselves, or do these interfaces free us up to learn more important things we wouldn’t have the time for if we were still tinkering with springs and levers?

From a SaaS Savvy perspective, I’ve given this sort of question a ton of thought. How much do we need to know about all things software as laypeople? As software sellers? As designers?

My personal opinion will be no surprise.

The internet, SaaS, and cloud are completely interwoven parts of society today, and people should be easily imparted with at least the fundamentals of how it all works.

Today, why wouldn’t we expect that everybody is taught “the cloud” is a bunch of big buildings on earth with whirring racks of servers in the same way that we expect kids to graduate knowing that the earth revolves around the sun and what a mitochondrion does?

Give me an interface to the internet all day please - but teach me enough to be dangerous 🔥