All projects: Gel, Jobs, Gootodo, Games, Uncle Mark, Goovite, Blog, Bit Literacy
Problems of complexity and choice
Oct 27, 2005
Part of my goal in Good Experience - in the newsletter and its associated projects - is to point out where the user experience is failing.
One of the repeat offenders is consumer technology. Consider some recent analysis from this Wharton article:
Complexity among consumer technology products has never been greater -- a good thing if the complexity means product improvement. But Wharton experts say new bells and whistles pose challenges to businesses and consumers alike. Complexity -- along with choice -- can have a big impact on how firms make and market new and improved gizmos, and on the decision processes of the people expected to buy them...
"In introducing tech products today, the main emphasis is on differentiation and how your product is unique. But if you fast-forward another five or 10 years, ... we will start to see ease of use become the most compelling feature of all."
Notice the two problems mentioned: complexity and choice. There is a Good Experience project that addresses each.
The complexity of most technology is a topic never far from my typing fingers, as I've endured and railed against some of the worst of it for years. However, many of us in the Good Experience community took it a step further a couple of years back with This Is Broken, which is a compilation of readers' complaints about poorly design, over-complex technology (as well as other offenders). I'm happy to announce a full redesign of the site, which I hope helps to invigorate the project. Check it out.
And regarding choice:
As we learned from Barry Schwartz at Gel 2005 this past April, and in the Good Experience interview, the paradox of choice is a growing phenomenon in affluent societies - in everything from technology products to the hundreds of salad dressings we choose from. So much choice weighs us down rather than freeing us up as it was supposed to do.
The problem of too much choice isn't caused only by the manufacturers of all these gadgets and devices; it's fueled in large part by the media, which delights in showing off and comparing a near-infinity of models and configurations of the various devices: cameras, PDAs, plasma TVs, DVRs, and on and on. The more devices they review, the more "content" they have to sell to advertisers.
The only constituency left out of this process, of course, is the customers themselves, who are left scratching their heads and still wondering which device to buy. I mean, even the venerable and respected Consumer Reports shows enough digital cameras to make a reader's head spin.
I've had it with too-complex products, too many of them, and too little information guiding non-techies to a good buying choice... so I just rewrote my own buying guide and you can get it right now.
Download the Uncle Mark 2006 Gift Guide and Almanac, rewritten and updated for the 2005/2006 holiday season.
This is my set of answers to questions I get all the time - "which digital camera should I by? which laptop? which gift for my high school-aged nephew? when should I go to the Met?"
And the twist: I only give ONE ANSWER. When someone asks me which digital camera they should buy, I don't give a four-dot comparison of "the 45 leading brands"... I give ONE answer. Here's the ONE that I endorse, as a technology expert, for all the non-techies who don't want to have to become techies just to buy a camera.
Read it, e-mail it, print it, pass it along. It's yours.
I'll finish with some words from MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, who at last week's Pop!Tech conference in Maine said (and this is not a quote but my best paraphrase)...
For a long time we've seen how the technology industry works. Andy Grove makes the processor faster, Bill Gates uses up more of the processing power. And we, the users, never see any of it. But it's not just that; it's even worse. We're actually getting less from our technology now.
My laptop five years ago ran faster and more reliably than the one I have today.
And the one I had five years before that ran even better, and so on, all the way back to my first 512k Mac in 1985. I flipped the switch, it went "bing", it was on, and I could start typing. Instant on.
The problem is that software programmers get paid for putting in code, and so the programs they write get slower and slower. If we'd just pay programmers for every line of code they remove, we'd have a much better software world.
Until we reach that nirvana of a customer-centered technology industry, keep sending in your gripes to This Is Broken, and keep buying the best technology we have at the moment, as picked by Uncle Mark.
The best part is the irony of the 1st job posting under the column, for TiVo Inc which seems to be looking for someone with the opposite perspective. "Help us evolve the product that revolutionized television!", their add says.
Complexity and choice - you targeted two of my favorite subjects.
The reality is that complexity needs to rise on the corporate side so that it diminishes for customers. Attaching a modem and self-diagnostic system to a swimming pool is more complex for Wagner Pools than just building a pool - but it gives them a means to spot and fix problems before they impact customers.
In my experience, most people - and by extension, most companies - avoid complexity. So few programmers, marketers or CEOs take on the things that really drive customers crazy (for dozens of examples see LESS, my free guide at www.nowpossible.com/less)
As for choice, I agree with you that one trustworthy recommendation is often what people really want. Even better is giving people the opportunity to drive down to greater levels of detail only if and when they express an interest.
I enjoy your postings; keep them coming.
Negroponte is paraphrased as saying:
"My laptop five years ago ran faster and more reliably than the one I have today. And the one I had five years before that ran even better, and so on, all the way back to my first 512k Mac in 1985. I flipped the switch, it went "bing", it was on, and I could start typing. Instant on."
Sorry, but that's not my experience. My 512K Mac took ages to start up -- it booted from a floppy! And later, when I got a 20 MB hard drive for it, that would have to be turned on first and spin up for about 30 seconds before I even turned the computer on.
My mom's Mac LC took so long to start up that she'd turn the computer on in the morning, then go make a cup of coffee in the microwave and be back before it finished.
Meanwhile, my G5 now takes about 40 seconds to start up, and about 10 seconds waking from sleep which, you may note, wasn't even possible to do on most computers 5 years ago.
Writing emails took longer, formatting documents took longer, and working with audio and video took way, way, way longer.
It's true that I still work 8 hours or more on my computer each day, so faster computers doesn't mean I get to work less. But what I can accomplish on a computer in the same amount of time has gone up significantly in the past 5 years, and certainly in the past 20 years. I'm not advocating feature creep or kitchen-sink-itis, but let's stay honest and admit that today's computers do more, faster and easier, than they did around the time of System 6, Windows 3.1 or especially MS-Dos.
TTFN
Travis
While I'm all for streamlining and "functional necessity" in technology, I disagree with Negroponte's *over*-simplification that old technology was faster and easier than new technology. That's one of those chestnuts that sounds like it should be true, such as "Kids these days are not as polite as kids used to be." But my experience with old Macs and old PCs was that they were much slower and clunkier unless you were performing the most basic tasks. You couldn't multitask or run applications that required a lot of processing power. Why do people make such outrageous statements? The usability and HCI challenge is not to improve user experience by limiting what users can do — it's to better understand how people learn and use new technology so that our own capabilities increase commensurate with its advances.
I suspect that the first OS that has an instant on-off (not hibernate, but instant on-off like a light switch) feature is going to have a major selling point. Energy prices are going to go up and the inability to easily turn computers on and off means that people leave them on all of the time. I would gladly trade using processing power to allow easy on-off than add lots of new features.
Very interesting article. I'm really wondering where our hyper-consumerist society will end up, because both complexity and choice seem to expand endlessly, caused by artificially created needs.
So I'm trying to adopt the following maximes to my life and lifestyle:
1. quality over quantity
2. less is more
Works quite good and makes you feel more free. Without feeling unhappy or having to live in the woods.
"The problem is that software programmers get paid for putting in code, and so the programs they write get slower and slower. If we'd just pay programmers for every line of code they remove, we'd have a much better software world."
That's a tad unfair, isn't it? (For what its worth, I've felt Negroponte was a better self-promoter than futurist to put it in pleasant terms). In fact, many coders get paid to simplify things. Its called refactoring.
But even if this was not the case, there are other people who are more to blame. First off, companies should be doing user acceptance testing and saying "I never once saw someone use this function. Let's ditch it," or, "Geez, people put borders on their cells all the time, but we've buried that four clicks deep. Let's move it up."
Secondly, marketing wonks believe that "200 new features" drives more sales than does "improved, simplified user interface." And chances are they're right. I doubt very much that people outside of the obsessive blog readers and industry journals are latching on to the less-is-more and more-is-way-too-much trend that's making the rounds. We must sit patiently until Malcolm Gladwell writes his book on this.
Finally, users vote with their cash. They upgrade obsessively, buying new features they don't really need and will never use. Word is absolutely bloated and confusing. Does that mean that people are using AbiWord, or AppleWorks or a nice, basic RTF editor? No, they're buying Word in droves.
That said, thanks awfully for the guide! Its very well researched and reasoned. I can't achieve that level of ... absoluteness? I'm a "buy one of these three" kind of guy. For example: like sports games? Buy Playstation. Like tinkering? Buy XBox. Like games that are quick to learn, and play well? Buy a GameCube.