The Perfect Virus principle #20: Individuality

As indicated in my post of Monday, 11/22/2010, I am extrapolating Jeff Walker's Principles for the Perfect Application into a discussion of The Perfect Virus. Since Jeff's monograph on the subject did not anticipate stealth or suicide mechanisms, any errors or lapses into stupidity are solely my additions and should not reflect poorly on what I consider to be the biggest single contribution to software application design since the invention of computers. And Jeff, thanks for giving me permission to do surgery on your baby.

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY:  The Perfect Virus provides a user dashboard (Prosumption principle #11) that lets each person create and use an optimal work environment, including a unique view of penetration and viability, to exactly meet their intellectual preferences and capabilities.


All people don't process information the same way. Some thinking styles are visual, some  attuned to text, and others to audio stimuli. I once knew an individual who would show up at meetings and not get a single thing. If you questioned him about the proceedings afterward, he would be absolutely dumfounded that certain discussions had even taken place. But if I provided him a written handout on which he could annotate his own notes, he had a perfect recollection of the meeting. Therefore each individual managing a virus function must be able to customize his (or her) dashboard to their particular thinking style. These styles might include (but are not limited to):

1. Analog icons that change color as various levels of urgency change.
2. Digital readouts, counters, ascending/descending timers.
3. Critical audio alarms.
4. William Gibson-like 3D data representations that can be rotated or zoomed.
5. A super-user Macro to create complex scenarios using the ARRGH (Astructural Recon & Raid Generation Hyperlanguage) capability described in principle #17, Operational Sophistication.

Since individual job performance is monitored and managed from command-chain dashboards, anything that "gets by" the primary operator should flash an exception notification up the supervisory command chain. Furthermore, management could limit access to the above capabilities based on the confidence they have in the particular operator.