Overwhelmed By Tech
Gadgets were supposed to make life simple. But some just make people crazy
So what makes for good design? The electronics industry could take a lesson from automakers. Cars once were hard to use, notes usability expert Norman. Cranks and manual chokes were needed just to get the car rolling. It took about 30 years before a simple turn of the key started the engine. The computer has been around for more than 50 years; no doubt desktops are easier to run than early punch-card models, but nobody thinks they are simple to use. The solution, says Ben Shneiderman, founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, is not to eliminate functions but to hide them. Automobiles do this, he says, by putting the engine under the hood and letting everyone but people willing to get their hands dirty operate the car from the driver's seat.
Think of the Palm, then, as a computer that doesn't need to be cranked to fire up. Unlike a desktop computer, Hawkins's hand-held doesn't take time to boot up. "No one has given them enough credit for the fact that the sucker just turns on," Stanford's Nass says. "The `instant on' is a huge, huge, huge psychological benefit." Designers are also finding ways to hide gee-whiz features wanted by a few tech aficionados while presenting major features for everyone else on a device's front panel or a program's main menu. Well-designed digital cameras, for example, hide extra ports for connecting gear behind flaps and doors. "Designers usually want everyone to notice the cool stuff," Nass says, "but the real genius is to hide things elegantly."
Ironically, technology may help make itself more simple. Continuing leaps in processing power and computer storage promise more horsepower to make complex products easier to use. Andy Hertzfeld, who helped design the original Macintosh in the early 1980s, recalls that early hard drives that held all of 5 megabytes and were the size of small refrigerators made it possible to produce the Mac's groundbreaking graphic interface. Two megabytes now fit in a remote control produced by Philips Consumer Electronics, whose Pronto model combines the dozen remotes that can come with a sophisticated home theater system. The Pronto doesn't come cheap, at $400. But, as with all technology, the price is bound to drop, probably sooner than later.
Likewise, personal computers are getting powerful enough to allow them to understand voice commands, hand gestures, and other cues. Accelerating that revolution is the goal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Project Oxygen," a $50 million effort funded by government and industry that aims to make computing as effortless as breathing. "We've been forced to operate the way computers do, rather than the other way around," says Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT's Lab for Computer Science. In a new book, The Unfinished Revolution, Dertouzos describes prototypes of simpler products that could be adopted and produced by industry. Start-up companies, less burdened by the profit expectations of companies with existing product lines, could be crucial.
Big companies like Microsoft and Gateway are understandably loath to abandon products used by more than 100 million people. "Such an abrupt turnabout," Dertouzos says, "could be suicide for them." He and other analysts think it will take five years for most of the big high-tech players to adopt more intuitive designs.
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