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Tim Brown On Current Design Challenges
prostoalex writes "Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, design company that is quite famous for its work on designing office chairs, Palm computers, Microsoft mice, Nike shoes, etc. MIT Technology Review interviewed Tim Brown on current challenges in the design world, exciting fields for a designer to be in, current annoyances in the user interface design."
I have absolutely no expertise in interface design, and almost as little REAL expertise in hard-core technology, but I am a designer by profession; I'm a Landscape Architect - mostly designing neighborhoods, resorts, and other places where we live out our day to day lives.
One challenge we face in the design projects I'm involved with that I'm fairly certain translates to the kind of design Brown talks about is the "lowest common denominator" problem. We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand.
The general populace tends to be slow to accept radical changes to familiar things like the way a suburban street or a park feels. They have an expectation that has built up over several years, and things that are different (and often much, much better) seem strange, and are sometimes rejected outright. We fear change. Change is bad. The same is often true for things like community zoning boards (made up of average Joe, average Bill, and average Jane).
Its an interesting problem, and the major challenge for us is to keep our designs current and progressive without succumbing to the temptation to just arbitrarily "dumb down" our work.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
I really wish someone would give these guys a pile of cash to redesign computer GUIs. I can't be the only one that is sick of the slow pace of development of computer interfaces. We really haven't progressed much since the work of Xerox Park.
What we need are some designers - who are not technies or nerds - to sit down and completely redesign the interface from scratch. Forget the "windows" metaphor, forget "icons" and clicking with the mouse - really start from first principals.
If you've ever sat down with someone who hasn't used a computer much and watch them struggle to do the simplest things, you'll understand how bad current GUIs are. The trouble is people that use computers are so used to their bad design that they fail to notice it. For example, when I press the on button, I want it to turn on. Instantly. I don't want to have to wait several minutes for it to "warm up" like the old TVs used to. And when I press the off button, I want it to turn off. Instantly. And if I press the on button again, I want to see the same stuff on the screen as when I last switched it off. And that's just the functionality of the on-off button!
It's 2003 for christsakes. Why am I still using an interface that was designed in the 1970's, when computers had a tiny fraction of the power and functionality they currently have?
I would be interested to see what this guys opinions on apple designs are, and why they are so goddam desirable.
It appears that Tim Brown has actually managed to make the leap from the mess that was WAP in Europe two or three years ago. Basically it took a large, online medium (The web) and tried to just force it onto a mobile device. As he notes, it didn't work and no one wanted it. WAP is dead.
Seems as though the major 3G vendors in Europe could do with contracting Tim, though. All of them are desperate to push their mobile platforms as some sort of miniture web platform. But as Tim notes, do you really need or want to watch streaming video on a mobile? It seems that they are all so wrapped up in the technical side of things that someone forgot to ask the people they're trying to sell too.
My personal opinion is that 3G will fail to take off until the vendors drop all pretense of it being some sort of mini-web device and actually recognise that people do not want to watch a postage stamp sized weather report video.[1]
What do I know; I don't have billions of Euros in 3G licences I'm desperatly trying to claw back.
[1]: This is an actual advert from 3 here in the U.K. An example of a phone being used to watch a weather report. It looks very nice, sure, but what extra information does a little colour 3D map with clouds on offer instead of a spoken report?
My favorite example of this is a Nortel ad that was running frequently last year. It had a guy who was going to be speaking at some big meeting, but forget his speech at the office. He used his mobile videophone to have his office assistant read it to him quietly, and he repeated it to the unknowing audience, with the phone sitting hidden on the lectern.
Now, what use is the live video in this case? I can get the same functionality today with my plain-old 2G phone (no video, of course). If you just need to repeat what someone is telling you over the phone, you sure don't need the live video. If this gee-whiz, look-how-cool-the-future-is example, unconstrained by reality, is the best 3G can do, isn't it in a whole heap of trouble?
I work at a company that has built a product that is micro designed to work on mobile phones and other devices via the mobile Internet. The challenges are quite amazing, because, as we know, the web doesn't fit well on a 1" by 1" screen, or even a little bit larger. There are also a host of other issues that need to be addressed, and the challenges mount. But, I believe, we have come up with a successful solution that is device indenpendant and network agnostic. You can visit the Beta of this product at http://www.winksite.com If you have a wap-enabled phone, just go to winksite and try it out from there. We are a start-up with domestic and international patent pending technology that is welcomes feedback. PS: I believe i-Mode is a culture, a way of life. I visited NTT DoCoMo's booth at CeBit the other day, and it was #%$@#ing cool. 'Tude was everything.
This is exactly what XML could be really useful for, in theory. In the best of worlds proper content markup would enable you to browse your material in whatever way you wanted.
Sadly, McLuhan's ideas makes this pure utopia. The medium and presentation greatly affect the content in most situations, which make machine interpretation of whats "interesting" extremely difficult. We're shooting at a very moving target.
An example: The New York Times is excellent to read from dead trees. It also transfers reasonably to high resolution screens, but as everybody knows, reading long articles online just isn't as pleasant. Now transferring it to my 1.25" cell phone screen just isn't gonna cut it at all. Too many words, too little information.
The only papers that have been even remotely successful in going WAP here in Sweden are the tabloids. They write short pieces that convert well into a handful of WAP cards. Oops, there I go rambling again.
In particular, there are two classes of advert. Smut, and Stupid. Any 3G advert you saw until very recently fit into either of those two catagories. A mutli billion Euro investment being sold on the basis of Smutty and Stupid. Quick, hire me that advertising agency!
As you say, 3G is an executive toy. In its current form it is the answer to a question nobody asked. An example I heard recently was from the CEO here at $WORK [1]. He was at a trade show, and came across a 3G vendor who was showing off their new toys.
"So what can this super video phone do then?" asks my boss.
"You can access streaming video!" enthused the sales person. The sales person then proceded to demonstrate the only video stream that was available at the time; a webcam which overlooked the their gravel driveway.
Hold me, I'm having palpatations!
I think secretly, the 3G vendors know they've fucked up, and bad style. You would have hoped that they would have learned after the abismal failure that was WAP, but no. You would have thought that they would understand why SMS is popular, and why video messaging will not be, but no. You would have hoped they would have a better way to justify billions of investors and share holders cash, but aparently not. Don't invest in any pure 3G vendors for a while..
[1]: Hence the AC.
Ok, there's no doubt this guy knows what he's talking about, and TiVo's great :), but some of what he says seems to contradict itself.
First he says we want actions on PDAs to be quick:
That tells you a lot about the kinds of interactions that people want to have with mobile devices. They want to be quick. They want to be able to do something thatâ(TM)s just sort of chunked up into small things.
And then:
His belief in simplicity was what got Palm edited down to four buttons, and that was ultimately responsible, I think, for its success. Itâ(TM)s not that you canâ(TM)t do a thousand different things with your Palm Pilotâ"itâ(TM)s just that those thousand different things arenâ(TM)t right at the top level.
Now, I like the Palm, but his description of it makes it sound like it's a multistep process to get anywhere, which isn't quite "quick" to me.
He says e-mail is not displayed in a way that's easily manageable. I agree; my inbox is a mess. However, he says they should be more like blogs "because weâ(TM)re quite good at sequencing." Scuse? Is not e-mail organized by date?
I dunno.. I think e-mail might be better integrated with the calendar (sorted by due date, or as a floating item) than with the blog.
I could just be ranting, though...
I know you were joking, but I want my Karma, so I'm going to reiterate your post in a serious tone.