I Think I Am in Trouble
Today, November 3, 2005 is the first annual World Usability Day. I learned
of it through a message from a friend directing me to a USA Today article called
“Why are tech gizmos so hard to figure out?” The concept resonates
with me. More and more I use elaborate converged devices, like my wonderful
Treo 650, but I use decreasingly smaller subsets of their overall functionality.
So, I looked forward to reading the article. But I was caught up after the
first paragraph – and as I begin writing this article, I have not even
yet read beyond the third paragraph - by the image of a beautiful, white iPod.
The byline for the image read: “Usability experts point to the iPod as
the poster child of good usability.” Gulp.
Here’s the
article. It’s a good one. I recommend it. I’ve now read it all
and it’s quite thoughtful.
Why I am in trouble is that while I have played with friends’ iPods,
my stunning lack of ability to understand exactly how to use one has caused
me to shy away from purchasing one. I can’t even get ear buds to stay
in my ears. Instead, I lay grand schemes to figure out how to get my laptop’s
iTunes music onto my Treo and purchase easier-to-use but uncool earphones; schemes
that never quite hatch, due partially to lack of time and partially to “fear
of learning curve.”
Age is a factor, of course. Everything is a little bit tougher to do when you
have to find and put your reading glasses on first. Have you ever run across
what is now one of my current pet peeves? I check into a really nice hotel and
fall asleep reading. The next morning I get up, get the shower water streaming
just right, step in, and then realize that I cannot tell which of those three
little bottles of liquid contains shampoo–as opposed to conditioner or
lotion--without my glasses on. Since I am already wet and don’t really
know where my glasses ended up the night before anyway, I have been known to
“shampoo” with conditioner; not a good thing.
At the moment, with two young adults still at home. I can continue to do what
nearly all parents do, and ask my son or daughter how to, oh, how to work the
settings on our new stove top. D'es “broil high” mean you are setting
it to broil at a high temperature, or that you are placing the food to be broiled
at one of the higher positions inside the oven? Actually, neither my kids nor
I have figured that one out yet. And the manual is not helpful, having clearly
been inadequately translated from a non-English language.
But even my kids can’t help me with some techie issues. For example,
I have yet to figure out how to properly use the extended memory card in my
Treo 650. So I keep on getting messages telling me that the memory is near full
and I have to painstakingly figure out how to erase something. The kids can’t
help me because they don’t have Treos D’oh! Not only can they not
afford them and I won’t shell out the cash, they don’t even want
a Treo.
One of the few people in the United States who probably d'esn’t have
to worry about this kind of thing is President Bush. He travels with
his pockets empty of technology, and everything else. No doubt there is
someone right there to help with the telephone when he needs to put someone
on hold.
So, why are so many products less easy to use than they could be? Why is it,
for example, that to shut down a Windows computer the first thing you have to
do is go to “start?” The article identifies forces: corporate demands,
such as “Get it out and start selling it!; the demands made on design
by vastly different generational needs; the complexity caused by adding more
and more features to things.
Given my experiences in life, I think the biggest reason is the assumption
by engineers and other techies that everyone else thinks like them. As one person
interviewed in the USA Today article said, "A whole lot of companies went
out of business because their users were too stupid."