Overwhelmed By Tech
Gadgets were supposed to make life simple. But some just make people crazy
Maybe, but everything still hangs on the consumer. No matter how well designed the personal planner or cellphone, most people still need to read the manual. The original Palm has changed little since it was created to do a few things--organize addresses, a task list, and appointments. But not even Palm can promise an effortless transition to its hand-held for newcomers. "You want technology to be as intuitive as possible," says Michael Mace, Palm's chief competitive officer. "But there are still times when you need to learn about a new technology."
Death spiral. That's true for most of today's digital tools. Many users complain, for example, of being overwhelmed by E-mail, but they won't devote an hour or two to learn how the software can filter messages and automatically route them to different folders, or even to the trash. Voice mail has similar shortcuts. But few take the time to learn how to skip past a long, unimportant message or save important ones. Consumers also should accept that absent a friendly neighbor or relative who's a tech geek, they'll need to buy training and support for today's complicated gadgets. There's a reason companies budget big sums to maintain their computers: Systems crash.
Still, people want the cool stuff. Call it the "consumer-driven death spiral," says author Alan Cooper. "You interview a thousand people, and each one says, `I want these 10 general features plus this specific feature,' " says Cooper. "So you build a device with 1,010 features. But no one wants 1,010 features."
Actually, some people do. Downstairs in the Home Entertainment Lounge at Sony Style last week, Walter Mihatov, a 37-year-old network administrator for a bank, was shopping for a big-screen TV. But which one? On the one side is the wide-screen flat television, "the future," he calls it. On the other is the 4-by-3-foot screen, which is "more conventional." At about $2,000, the 4 x 3 is half the price of wide-screen technology. But in about five years, Mihatov confesses, he would have to convert to wide screen anyway, because digital will be the rage.
Rage, shmage. For better or worse, the world has moved beyond the simpler days of Phineas Thaddeus Veeblefetzer and the gizmos he designed just for the fun of it. But one thing has become clear from the blowback high-tech companies have been treated to over the past few months: Consumers may not expect all their new gadgets and gizmos to be fun, but they are demanding that at least they don't make them feel like idiots.
With Kit Roane
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