I saw the most fantastic advertisment on daytime telly the other day. For those of you who have Cable, daytime telly in the UK on the terrestrial (“free” in that you just pay for your TV licence) channels is the closest you get to the general crap informercialness of normal Cable channels all the time. The best thing on was this fantastic ad for an idiot-proof video recorder. It was about a minute long, describing how with this fantastic piece of equipment you could be guaranteed to record what you wanted, when you wanted it.
Sounds good, right? Well, yes and no. See the instructions were very very simplistic. The remote consisted of three dials — the top dial for setting the day (Mon – Sun), the second for the start-time, the third for the end-time (or number of hours to record for, or something). Each about 5 cm in diameter, so the remote itself is massive. The voice-over also explained that you have to put the video in and set the right channel on the video recorder itself. So this video can’t even record on BBC 1 at 8pm for an hour, then Channel 5 at 11pm for an hour to get this week’s episode of Lexx. It’s the most simplistic video-recorder I’ve seen in my entire life … and I am old enough to remember some fairly basic ones.
What concerns me is that there is evidently this opportunity in the market. Some people are so over-faced by their complicated video recorders that they feel the need to go back to absolute basics. The usability of their sophisticated modern technology has failed them so absolutely that they are willing to pay more money for far far fewer features, just so they can rely that it will do what they want it to do, rather than what their 2 year old has programmed it to do. This I can understand … if all I had was a house full of taped Teletubbies episodes, I’d be a little closer to the edge too.
But what does this say about the industry? This has happened in the arena of electronics although perhaps it is a doomed attempt to corner a market that isn’t really that big. My interactions with various relatives, however, lead me to suspect that maybe there really is a massive market for this type of thing. Nobody wants to have to rely on their kids to get their stuff video’d. In a way this is the appeal of the Sky Plus boxes, which are Tivo-like, but apparently more idiot-proof. Are we going to see a similar trend in computing?
Or has this trend already started? For reasons best not explained here, I had to do an install of Win XP Pro this weekend. Whilst it was doing it’s thing and throwing up propaganda onto the screen, I glanced at what it was trying to get across. A lot of it revolved around only the options you needed being on the screen … about simplifying the interface. This is presumably what that horrible green-blue creation is all about .. making your PC “friendlier”. It’s definitely what that saccharine little paper-clip is all about. Is the next phase of software development not going to be about functionality, but about usability taken to an extreme? Are we just going to make things dumb and dumber from now on?
Comments (10) Permalink
December 31st, 2003 at 10:06 PM
I think that in the world of personal computers were seeing a quite fundamental shift that is seldom commented upon: the move from computers as tools of production to computers as tools of consumption.
As late as the early to mid 1990s, people bought computers to produce things: to word process, to handle their accounts, to write new software, and so on. Back then, the only real use for computers as tools of consumption was the playing of games.
Since then, we’ve seen the rise of many applications that are essentially about consuming information: the Web, music-sharing, PCs as entertainment centres, and so on. I’d imagine that the vast majority of computer time in modern homes is taken up with such things, with perhaps a bit of emailing or instant messaging thrown in. Even I, despite being in the middle of writing several books, maintaining a weblog and working on a few programming projects, mostly spend my time sitting at the computer at home consuming rather than creating.
User interfaces, however, haven’t really made this transition. There have certainly been wonderful production-oriented interfaces (the UNIX shell!) but not, so far as I can tell, any decent consumption-oriented interfaces. Windows, though is in the middle of the transition from a poor production-oriented interface to a mediocre consumption-oriented interface!
January 1st, 2004 at 2:30 AM
Those losers that built that ” poor production-oriented interface” called Windows are the richest people on the planet. Oh….that’s right, money is evil.
January 1st, 2004 at 11:34 AM
I certainly don’t think that money is evil. Indeed, my business card says “Richard Baker, physicist, entrepreneur” and my homepage says something similar. However, it certainly isn’t true that markets select technically superior products or services. Instead, they select products and services that are well adapted to the current economic environment (which includes, amongst other things, the current installed base for various other products). These two things may sometimes coincide, but in general they won’t.
This is especially true in the case of operating systems aimed at mass markets. The currently most popular operating system has a gigantic advantage, because it encourages application developers to target it, which means that there will be more and cheaper applications available for it, which in turn encourages more people to adopt the platform. This is the situation in which Microsoft currently operates. In fact, the primary competition for a new release of Windows is older releases of Windows, rather than, for example, Linux or MacOS X. All of which means that Microsoft isn’t maintaining its current position by technical superiority.
In fact, Microsoft didn’t even achieve its current position of dominance through technical excellence. Instead, it got there through outwitting IBM in strategy. Essentially, Microsoft beat its opposition in the 1980s by tying its operating system (MS-DOS, at the time) to an open hardware platform. Competition between IBM-compatible PC manufacturers meant that IBM-clone hardware was substantially cheaper than other systems, which meant that people tended to buy it, and hence to buy MS-DOS. The installed base of DOS computers by the late 1980s and early 1990s meant that Microsoft could weather the fiascos of the early versions of Windows – even Windows 3.1, the release that finally took off, was a pretty poor and confused interface as anybody else who had to suffer its use could confirm.
So why did IBM choose a CP/M-like operating system written by Microsoft rather than a more mature and sophisticated operating system like some brand of Unix? For the simple reason that Unix was developed for large, powerful computers, and desktop computers in the early 1980s were anything but powerful. What was needed was something that was incredibly simple. As desktop computers have advanced, Microsoft has, of course, converted Windows into a more Unix-like system.
It was thus only the emergence of a new niche, some canny business sense, and a fair amount of luck that allowed Microsoft OSs to win out. And there were clearly technically superior systems through this time, from the Amiga 1000 in the mid-1980s to the BeBox in the mid 1990s to machines running MacOS X today. None have been so overwhelmingly technically superior that they’ve been able to overcome the powerful effect of the Windows installed base.
Those that have won out in certain niches, such as the Amiga in video production in the years around 1990, have done so by targetting niches in which the installed base effect has been weak. Consumption-oriented interfaces be (might have been?) been another such niche. It’s certainly possible that Apple thinks so, and is targetting it with such things as iTunes and the iPod.
And, for that matter, Unix is just as much a product of the business world as any of the other systems I’ve discussed here. After all, it was produced by Bell Labs!
January 1st, 2004 at 11:46 AM
I agree with Rich — there’s nothing wrong with money. I quite like it in fact, else I doubt I would have chosen the particular path I have. My qualms with Windows in most of its incarnations are mainly precisely because of what Rich has so eloquently stated — I mainly use computers in my work and life for production … so a consumption-oriented interface is not for me. I don’t need my computer to understand things for me and shorten the number of options at my disposal. I understand well enough myself to just use it.
Just because I’m not the market things like Win XP are targetted at doesn’t mean I can’t see its merits though. I just wonder what it means for the industry if the next major shift in all things is really towards consumption rather than production. It’s definitely going to force a lot of culture and attitude change in many programmers, if nothing else.
January 2nd, 2004 at 2:29 PM
Meri, you should really try to keep pokey from jumping up on the visitors. Tsk.
I suppose over simplified products are going to be the next round of errors, as in, everyone has finally grasped that usability is important, now for a more subtle error.
Thats the challenge I guess, making things easier for the novice without making them harder for the expert. Usability at the cost of, well, usability.
January 2nd, 2004 at 2:36 PM
No, just the right kind of usability. You have to cater for all types of users — novice, intermediate, advanced, regular, intermittent, occasional — as well as for usability and learnability. An example of catering for learnability is having menu bars, with the most frequent options uppermost. The way that intermediate and intermittent users are catered for is via icons on toolbars. In turn, advanced regular users can use keyboard shortcuts if it worth it for them to put the initial outlay into learning the shortcuts. This is one thing that the Windows environment has definitely got right — Ctrl-C, -X, -V, work just about everywhere in the same way these days.
February 28th, 2004 at 1:36 PM
I criticize by creation — not by finding fault.
February 28th, 2004 at 6:56 PM
Is that last one comment spam or not? There doesn’t seem to be an URL, but it really does SOUND like comment spam. If you’re a real person, could you please come back and elaborate?
December 31st, 2003 at 10:11 PM
From production to consumption
Meri Williams wrote in a recent article: For reasons best not explained here, I had to do an install of…
January 1st, 2004 at 12:01 PM
The dominance of Microsoft
In reply to my earlier article (in its incarnation as a comment on Meri’s weblog), someone called “dorkSpotter” commented: Those…