DC

I thought this report was interesting: half of all “malfunctioning” products are in full working order, it’s just that the poor bloody customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices. Even worse for them, companies frequently dismiss them as ‘nuisance calls.’ It was a nice touch that the study being reported involved giving managers products to use over a weekend:

The managers returned frustrated because they could not get the devices to work properly.

A nice glow of Schadenfreude there.

This report didn’t surprise me, nor did Elke den Ouden’s conclusion that Most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process: product definition — which I take to mean that they never clearly worked out what it was they were trying to do with the thing. I’ve been thinking for a long time that many examples of modern technology have been designed by people who have given no thought to how real people would interact with the devices.

Take digital cameras. I have a nice wee digital camera which I got for nothing because a friend got so fed up with trying to get it working that he thrust it at me, saying Here, take the bloody thing, I never want to see it again. Now, I have (it seems) some sort of talent in sitting down with a bit of technology and figuring out how to use it without too much difficulty. It didn’t let me down here: within five minutes of trying to get the camera working, I had taken several pictures and transferred them to the PC. I mention this, though, not to show technologically challenged my friend is (though he really is), but to show that I have little problems most of the time with technology and software. (It is ironic that I regularly advise people like my friend to RTFM while I have hardly ever read a manual myself.) Yet not so long ago, a bunch of us were looking at another digital camera — I think it was at l_zinkiewicz’s leaving drinkies do — and none of us could figure out how the thing was supposed to work. We might as well have been trying to read quipu when were prowling through those menus.

It seems to me there are two basic problems with a lot of modern kit:

1. It has been designed by people who have a fixed idea about how they would use it, without considering whether or not it would even occur to someone who hadn’t been involved in that process to use it in that way.

2. There is huge over-reliance on icons. Most icons are completely meaningless to anyone seeing them for the first time, yet a lot of kit (and software — but at least you might get tooltips there) has nothing but icons to indicate what you are supposed to do. This was, by the way, the problem with that camera. Little or no text, just a lot of obscure wee icons.

All of which is a pain, and it irritates me that, for example, my mother got a mobile phone a while back which is almost unusable because of a hideously badly designed menu system (she has to enter a number manually every time she wants to call it). I do worry, though, about the application of such design techniques in areas such as aviation, or the military, or car design.