|
| A lament about bad design |
|
navigational aids: News ticker:
|
06 February 04. OK, this was going to be a lament about any of a number of things, with a general discussion of how to design things to be useful but not annoying. However, I fear that it's going to turn in to a rant about MSFT. Sorry, guys. It's about designing things for dumb people. This is, by itself not a bad thing. After all, designing for less cognitive effort benefits us all, just as features designed for the handicapped are often embraced by able people who just want it easier. [I've been using the twiddler lately; it would be most useful for people who only have one functioning hand, but I like it because it lets me drink tea and type at the same time.] Or, at the other extreme, here is an article about how an unintuitive interface killed John Denver. The two prime examples of this would be advertising and MSFT products. I think the whole thing about idiot-proofing Windows has been discussed to death, and needs no elaboration here. I've already talked about how advertising has gone from a long textual evocation of the product (with bold headlines for those who are just skimming) to a picture of the product being held against a pair of breasts. Don't get me wrong, intuitive interfaces and things that dumb or inattentive people can readily digest are not necessarily bad. But what makes them horrible is when the design makes it impossible or too difficult for not-dumb people to go beyond the dumb level. For example, when waiting for a subway train, I am confronted with a number of large, backlit ads right in front of me, and I typically have about ten minutes to kill. This is the perfect opportunity for the vendor to tell me all about the product, in great, backlit detail. And yet all settle for a picture. and a tag line. with inappropriately placed periods. where a comma or hyphen will do. This is true for both SBUX, which will just show you a picture of a cup (which we presume contains coffee) or Boeing/McDonnell-Douglas, which outbid SBUX for ad placement at the Pentagon Metro station, and advertises bombers and helicopters. Surely there's more information that we need to know about the latest bomber than about a cup of coffee? But the advertising won't tell me. If I care, there's nothing for me to do for ten minutes but to stare at the picture some more. Oh, I could look elsewhere, but I'm not elsewhere. I'm on a subway platform, waiting. I want to see the information that got thrown away in a desperate attempt to get the point across with a minimum of cognitive effort, and am frustrated that I can't. The other prime example of this is of course anything written for MSFT Windows. It's easy to sit down and use, which I would be an arse to be annoyed by, but it's supremely difficult to go beyond the easy stuff. Spent an hour yesterday trying to get the cute little browser thing to hide files beginning with a dot. I even wrote Dell tech support, who blew me off. As you can plainly see, if I want something that seems possible, but isn't, I will be frustrated and unable to continue to function as a normal human being. My favorite foil whom I've linked to before, Joel, goes on and on about how frustration comes from having things that don't work the way you expect them to, adding little bits of cognitive effort and annoyance to your day. Joel probably describes many people, but I am most frustrated by tools that just plain don't work. Screwdrivers are truly counterintuitive, if you ask me (to make screw go out, turn counterclockwise?), but I learned the righty-tighty/lefty-loosy thing. When even that doesn't help, (like the screw is upside-down or with the few reversed-thread nuts on a bike) I am indeed frustrated. But I am infinitely more frustrated when the screwdriver is made from cheap metal and bends when the screw is too hard to undo. Implicit to all of these things is a promise: I will tell you about my product; I will help you make your document look just right; I will unscrew your screws. Sometimes getting that promise to work takes some compromise from both sides, which is how life is. It's not the compromises but the broken promises that really hurt. Somewhere, I read about how temperature gauges are less common on cars now, since somebody worked out that most people interact with the gauge by just looking to see if it's in the red, and panicking if it is. So why bother with a gauge? Instead, you just get a little light that tells you when the temperature is in what would have been the gauge's red part. I told Mr. DRC of Santa Monica, CA---a car expert if ever there was one---about this, and he had a hissy fit, listing three dozen things you can learn from a temperature gauge beyond whether it's in the red. So in following Joel's advice about minimizing cognitive effort for 95% of drivers, the other 5% are frustrated and dejected. It doesn't have to be that way. Design that includes the lazy doesn't have to exclude those who care, and if it does, it's as bad a design as one that only makes sense if you study it for an hour. I tried to come up with more examples of where things have been redesigned for the lowest common denominator and thus shut out those who care, but couldn't think of anything really good and pervasive. Television has always been written for dumb people, and since there's a time constraint, you have to pick your level of information and stick with it---unlike a print ad, it's physically impossible to say more. There are thousands of books with `for Dummies' in the title, but there have always been such how-to books, and for every such book, there's another that goes into all the detail you could want. This is even true of management books, which are typically the most supremely oversimplified books in existence, since businessmen often have a pompously overinflated idea of what their time is worth. Perhaps you, dear reader, can leave some suggestions in the box below. Meanwhile, I have nothing but a lament about the two realms where withholding from the consumer is vehemently defended as a good thing: working with PCs, and advertising. One particular item stands out as the intersectionof the two: MSFT PowerPoint, a computer program for creating advertising presentations. Its design makes summarization and mimimization of cognitive efffort easy and information dissemination difficult. E.g., as a counter to the too-difficult design interface which caused a disaster above, PowerPoint's design is partly responsible for the destruction of a Space Shuttle.
[link] [2 comments] Replies: 2 comments
|
