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I'm the technical one in my family. There's almost always one, and if you're reading this magazine it's probably you. You know, the one who has to sort out computer problems, the one who has to reset the video recorder after a power cut, the person who knows how to work all the remote controls in the house. Over the Christmas holiday I visited my parents and brother back in Sheffield, and left my wife and her parents back home in California, and the trip taught me painful lessons about how completely unusable modern consumer electronics have become.
The home front first. I have a modern TV with three inputs, and naturally enough three different devices that can output video into it. The TV and all the input devices have remote controls, and add to that a surround-sound system with a radio-controlled remote control that looks like a Star-Trek control pad and you've a recipe for chaos. I know how it works and can make it display anything, but then again I put it together. As soon as I walked out of the door my long-suffering wife and her parents wanted to watch a DvD and they were completely stumped. There are controls for changing the aspect ratio, color temperature, sound clipping and other esoterica that are completely unnecessary for simply watching a movie. They eventually retreated into the kitchen where there was an integrated TV and DvD with one remote control. They're not stupid, they knew exactly what they wanted to do but were completely unable to make an overly flexible system do the one simple thing they wanted. Remind you of any specific software yet ?
The second battle occurred back in England, when I wanted to get my parents a new flatscreen TV for Christmas. Living in the states I knew vaguely that the digital switchover was happening back in the UK, and tried to do some research into what they'd need. My parents aren't scared of technology, far from it, my father was an early adopter of the DvD and regular readers might remember my Mum copes with a Linux machine as a desktop. But they are pensioners, and their eyes, ears and physical co-ordination aren't good. I found them the perfect TV, they were very happy with it until it came time for them to use the new remote control. The buttons on it were tiny. They kept hitting the wrong one and getting the damn thing into a mode where the easiest way to get it into a known state was to hit the power button off, then on again. That button was also small but at least had been arranged away from the other buttons so it was easy to find even if you can't see so well. No one over the ago of thirty had to have been involved in the product design of the thing. Either that or people who only communicate via text messages from tiny cell-phones. Eventually we copied out a large A4 image of the remote control onto paper, labeled all the useful buttons and taped it to the cupboard above the TV. So much for elegant design.
Finally I had to help my brother, who is a newly qualified teacher, connect his laptop to the new expensive school blackboard device. Having had to turn up at various conferences around the world and get a Linux-running laptop connected to whatever projector they have available, often working with Windows-only trained staff I know a thing or two about getting laptops to connect to video devices, but this was the hardest setup I've ever had to work on. To make things worse he even runs Windows XP on his laptop, refusing to run Linux as he claims he needs full Microsoft Office compatibility (he still hasn't complained I put OpenOffice on it instead, maybe he hasn't noticed :-). To cut a long story short, it turned out his “auto-configuring/plug and play” Windows laptop refused to output to the projector device unless it was first connected to a standard external monitor, and then connected to the projector. If you want to know how this should work just Google for DDC/EDID to get the gory details. There was no way he could have figured this out himself given the messages the software was giving, he just thought his computer was broken.
There are elegant and useful designs for consumer electronics, just not the ones I ran across last month. As an example of how successful they can be when someone designs something right look at the success of the Apple iPod. I'm not an big Apple fan (I gave up most proprietary software a while ago) but they do tend to get the usability aspects of these things right. I was terribly amused to read a complaint emailed from Bill Gates to the head of his Windows Media Center group that the remote control for their device has over thirty buttons, whilst the Apple one has six. In a nutshell that sums up the difference between Apple and Microsoft and their respective systems. But I can't smile too much, as Free Software is even worse than Microsoft in this respect.
Our only hope is usability studies, like the ones done recently by the GNOME desktop developers, where they finally recognized errors like the “Send/Receive” button in the Evolution email program (I'd seen my Mum have problems with that for years and hadn't twigged as to why she was having difficulties with it). The problem at the moment is we design software for ourselves, the “technical” people in our family. We have to remember that we're not normal. We have to learn to see technical devices and software as others see them. Feeling a sense of pride in getting a device to do what we want doesn't mean we're clever, it means the design was wrong.
I'll leave you with a quote by Marcus J Ranum, from the old classic “the Unix-Haters Handbook” available for free download if you have a few hours spare for a fun read. It's very relevant even today.
“If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles – but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that”.