Why Don't You Do Something to Help Me?
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
Have you ever felt like flinging your computer out the window? Bashing your cell phone with a ball-peen hammer? Have you ever felt like yanking an ATM out of a supermarket wall with your bare hands?
In short, do you ever feel infuriated, foiled, thwarted, balked, incensed, hindered, prevented, checked, disgruntled, nipped, or baffled by technology? Do find your encounters with electronic devices driving you to ever greater levels of distraction?
Well of course you do. We all do.
Alan Cooper has a name for this malady of everyday life -- he calls it "techno-rage." And not only does Cooper think he knows why we're techno-enraged, he believes he has the solution.
I don't know about you, but anyone who claims to understand this situation has my undivided attention. Cooper goes right to the heart of the problem of all this proliferating, dysfunctional technology in his recently published book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity" (Sams, 1999)
According to Cooper, the problem starts small -- very small. It occurs at precisely the moment a microchip is integrated into a consumer product. Once a product becomes programmable via that tiny wafer of silicon, it ceases to be a simple tool with obvious functions. For all intents and purposes, it becomes a computer.
And therein lies the source of our collective irritation: Computers are programmed by software engineers, and while software engineers may be wonderful people, and terrific at a great many things, they're pretty bloody awful at understanding how human being interact with technology.
Alan Cooper is really telling tales out of class here -- he's a veteran software engineer himself, and the designer of the technology that became Microsoft Visual Basic. He knows firsthand that software engineers design products mainly to suit their particular way of interacting with technology, which is almost by definition not how the rest of us do.
To make matters worse, according to Cooper, the design process often conspires to make high-tech products unnecessarily complex -- features are easy to add to electronic devices, and the designers often fail to exert much discipline. The result is "feature bloat" -- scads of often poorly implemented features, and some entirely frivolous and useless ones (such as a cell phone that plays video games), instead of fewer, well-designed features.
The main fault, claims Alan Cooper, is in the technology design process. It's a process that frequently fails to clearly define the purpose of the product, to aim for that goal, and ship only when that goal is reached. Instead, high-tech products tend to accumulate new features throughout the development process -- and to be declared done only when the predetermined shipping date arrives. It's a topsy-turvey modus operandi.
Cooper not only makes a case for taming the technology development process, but also for wresting control of the human interface portion of the product away from the software engineers, and handing it to people who's job it is to understand how human beings interact with technology. He calls them "interaction designers."
So why do we put up with so much unsuitable technology? Quite simply, says Cooper, we tolerate bad technology design because we're so infrequently offered anything better. And these new high-tech products really are powerful and compelling -- even when they're also thoughtlessly designed.
By way of explaining this dilemma, Cooper employs the vivid analogy of a dancing bear. We know a bear is an unskilled dancer, so a dancing bear will always be seen as a remarkable creature, if only because we're surprised to discover that a bear can dance at all. Most of our current technology products are what Cooper calls "dancing bearware" -- the products may be clumsy, but we're so amazed that they work at all we often fail to question why they don't work well.
So, while we may be increasingly frustrated by technology, we usually don't recognize that the limitations were built in by the designers. Worse yet, we may assume it's our fault for being insufficiently trained -- for being "technologically illiterate." And isn't that precisely what we're being told by most of the technologists?
Computers in one form or another are invading all manner of consumer products, from cameras to telephones, but their functions, functionality and human interaction qualities are still being given woefully short shrift. As a consequence, technology is in the process of becoming the bane of our existence, instead of our considerate and attentive assistant.
Alan Cooper is a rare voice of comfort in these technological badlands. He develops his point in detail over the couple of hundred pages of his book, but its essence can be stated succinctly: Enraging technology is a result of bad design, plain and simple -- and it's a problem that really can be solved.
06 September 1999 |
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