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KISS
andyring writes "CNN has an interesting article about the increasing trend in electronics to add more and more features, less concise user manuals, and poor marketing, to products, which end up doing nothing more than increasing costs and frustrating users. As an example in the article, most people want cell phones that do one thing - make calls. Yet phones come with games, instant messaging, cameras, etc. You can't even buy a simple cell phone any more. Also cited, 25% of people think they own an HDTV, when the actual number is less than 10%. What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?"
quality control.
Learn to live by them.
Sent from your iPad.
Cell phones have become so fragmented, as most carriers offer multiple handsets with a variety of features which appeal to differing tastes. However, I still refuse to buy a new phone because my carrier still hasn't offered a phone that meets my specific needs. All I want is a good, small, clamshell, tri-mode phone from Verizon with built-in Bluetooth. I could care less about a camera, I already invested in a digital camera with a better resolution, and there seems to be a lot of anti-camera phone sentiment. When I went to get my passport renewed, people had to surrender their batteries.
In terms of user manuals. It's not like a lot of people read them anyway...that's like asking people to read the articles prior to reply here on slashdot. Look at all the good detailed instructions did for getting baby-boomers to program their VCR or time display.
How many software packages actually come with a full set of documentation anymore these days - it's like we are expected to go out any buy the user manual.
HDTV is a tough subject, because the industry has done such a poor job on rolling out HDTV. Not just the manufacturers, but also the stations, cable companies and the damned FCC. But you would think you would know whether or not you have HDTV after seeing what 1080i looks like.
The competing formats of DVD is equally confusing. My father-in-law made the mistake of buying DVD+R discs only to find out that he needed -R for his drive.
What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?
Like most businesses, they listen to only one thing: their bottom line. If you don't need a camera on your phone (and, frankly, who does?) then don't spend the extra few bucks on it. Make sure you tell the person why. There will certainly be some trickle effect of what is said, whether to management, at trade shows or in the media.
Unfortunately you have the KeepingUpWithTheJoneses factor to deal with: Jones(A) gets a new phone with games. Not to be outdone, Jones(B) gets a phone with games and a camera. Jones(C) gets a phone with games and a higher-resolution camera.. Repeat ad infinitum.
This isn't intended soley as potshots against camera phones but against the "Faster, Smaller, Better" upgrade cycle that these manufacturers impose on the consumers. Remember that every dollar you spend is after-tax money. Now think about how much that shiny new widget will really cost before you walk to the cash register. You need the money more than they do.
Trolling is a art,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
User interfaces should be well-designed and as simple to use as possible. Granted.
Include a quickstart guide with your gear. Good idea.
But for God's sake, don't forget about the concise user manual. I hate buying new gear and not getting a good manual with it. The manual should explain everything the unit can do in every configuration.
If they want to make a simple quickstart guide too, that's great, but don't leave out the full-blown details.
Sounds like business as usual to me.
I guess I'll never cease to be amazed at the medias propensity to discover the obvious.
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
kill everyone in marketing.
Let's face it; when it comes to technology, most people are ignorant. No matter how simple we make things, there will always be simpler people.
FloodMT: crapflood Movab
I find it interesting to look at the number of high-end replacement devices exist for home theaters. That's a market that's added every feature known to man, and the most loved component is often the Universal Remote that can simplify it to the point of actual usability by Mom. All of the power is still there, but there's a simple, unified interface for MOST users. Apple has done the same thing for years, and does it best in OSX. All the power is there, but the usability is so great that most people never notice. Tivo is an amazingly complex system behind the scenes (by normal person standards,) but the usability is such that again, Mom can use it. You don't have to have a simple product, you just have to make it usable for simple people.
Think back to the pre-digital days of cellphones. The cellphone had status. The smaller the phone, the more status. Remember when the Motorola Startac sold for over $1000? It was so incredibly small! And then of course more and more stuff got integrated onto chips, and lithium batteries came out, and then they had the ability to make phones really really small. These same developments also made them cheaper. The result was that the cellphone lost its status (remember Zoolander's mobile?). So, what is it now? Two things: a practical voice communication tool, of course. And... entertainment, and a new status thing in the form of having more cool features. Have you noticed that cellphones now are getting bigger? There will always be the older generation who want the phone to be as simple and convenient as possible and have no added features, but those are not high-markup sales. In fact those phones are sold in very small margins. The real money is being made on phones with cameras, two color screens, MP3 players, PDA features, push-to-talk, video players, and Java games, all in a three-ounce package that you can take with you. And yes, you can still buy basic phones. You can't buy a phone without a phone book, messaging and a minibrowser anymore, but those features are unobtrusive and users who don't care can just ignore them. For the rest of us, phones are cool.
Actually, WMA is less restrictive. I've been able to *legally* take 160kbps WMA files from a music site and turn them into 128kbps OGG files with a simple windows app.
Mac's AAC won't let you do that. They Vendor Lock-in with iPod.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
I prefer better battery capacity over all this features... Just look at Nokia... They add more and more features, but battery lifetime get less for every new phone they release :(
And we keep buying stuff because the last batch didn't make us happy; we figure if Johnny bought it, and he seems happy about it, that it will make us happy, too. Every advertising dollar spent is attempting to create needs, not serve them.
Thinking outside my Head
So good of you to spare some free time to correct the flaws of someone who studies and researches usability professionally.
Gimmicks do NOT exist to meet market demand. They are added to CREATE market demand. Cell phones didn't add games because people demanded them; the manufacturers added games and then marketed them as an essential reason to throw away your old phone.
Companies used the gimmicks as a tool for the marketers to create an artificial market demand. Sooner or later, the gimmicks become so silly that even good marketing can't sell them. That's when the crap features disappear, and the market becomes more-or-less stable. That's also the death of a growth-based company, and so manufacturers will do ANYTHING to avoid the natural evolution down the back slope of the bell curve.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The problem is that one man's simple includes a bluetooth feature and another man's simple includes 802.11b, and another man's simple... The fact is that it is far cheaper to market and distribute one device that does everything than a bunch of variations on "simple". Production cost is practically irrelevant these days, but part of the reason it is practically irrelevant is the economy of mass. Divide that mass into 10 different ideas of "simple" and suddenly production will bite you too.
I spent my college years working food service (waiting tables, bartending), and retail sales. When you have to deal with the general public, you really get your eyes opened as to the high level of stupidity out there. From complex things, to just every day common sense situations, I was shocked and amazed at how low the common denominator was out there.
Sometimes, I wonder how so many of us survive the world as long as we do these days....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's just like perl philosophy says: "Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible."
Trivial things like turning on your cell phone should be obvious - you shouldn't need a manual. This should not be compromised in the name of harder things like playing games or browsing the web. It's okay to make the user consult a manual for those.
And if you're supporting those harder things, you must have a comprehensive manual, because the people who want to do the harder things will, in the end, read it.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Why is it so hard to bundle a normal ringtone or two with a cell phone? My new-ish T610 plays salsa, reggae, and a couple corporate jingles, but there's not a single normal cell phone ring. Are people who want a phone to sound like... well... a phone really in the minority these days?
Well, the real trouble is that they are putting more effort into having a long feature checklist to put in the sales pitch, of course, plus as repeatedly mentioned that people buy based on the feature checklist, not a lot of time spent "test driving".
Did you ever spend time in an electronics store looking at the remotes and panel controls and asking "what's this one do"? The salesmen generally don't know. They know how to read you the feature checklist.
But electronics manufacturers would put in better controls if it weren't expensive and hard compared to a minimal number of buttons.
They all have to put in the same (or about same-priced) chip to run the remote or digital watch or cell phone. The chip gives them the feature checklist ("DVD also plays MP3! And WMA!") everything after that is expense with very little selling power.
A wheel to scroll through menus faster? Way more expensive than one button you have to hit over and over and over.
Six buttons and a wheel on your digital watch so each button doesn't need three modes? Extra five dollars to manufacture. And higher failure rate.
We now have an industry full of chips that double in brainpower every two years, but their connections to the outside world remain the same cost. So you have the same four buttons to access 97 features on your digital watch that used to have six features.
None of which explains why my now-dead 1990 Quasar VCR had a brilliant little button where one press meant "record now, current channel, for a half hour" and successive presses upped that to a hour, 90min, 2 hrs, etc. The button beside it, you could hit first, to delay recording to the next even half-hour, 2 presses to an hour, etc. These two buttons handled 98% of my timed-recording needs. Every VCR since has required me to go to a menu to set the start-time to the minute, then the duration to same.
Why did this not become universal? I have no idea. Because they're stupid about human factors?
10k songs, good sound
least restrictive DRM
6 buttons -- iPod.
The first point is that product manufacturers are the ultimate democratic institution. They make what the consumers want.
But more to the point.
For years I would only purchase the cheapest possible microwave. Why? Because they had a knob, and NO temp control.
Microwaving turns out to be pretty non-exact science. I want my left overs heated, I want my popcorn popped.
In order to do this in a "good" microwave, it could take a half a dozen to a dozen gestures setting the time to the second (A totally useless time measure when cooking) and the tempreture to a specific setting (which has no human meaning whatsoever).
In a cheap microwave, it only took a single gesture. Turn the knob to about the right amount of time, and it turns on, cooks for the right amount of time, and shuts itself off.
A few years ago not even cheap microwaves came with knobs. There are a couple of Restraunt grade ones that do (They appreciate the minimum number of steps in a restraunt), but they are hard to locate and very expensive. But I was resigned to my purchase.
I moved into a new home, and it had a built in microwave. A really nice Sharp, with a TON of buttons. With horror I began schemeing how to get rid of the beast.
But the story has a happy ending. I still do exactly the same things I do with the microwave, heat leftovers, and pop popcorn. And the sharp has two buttons that do precisely that. It has a heat leftovers button. And it has a pop popcorn button. 1 Gesture, and now I don't even have to know "how long". The amount of technology to pull this off, is magnitudes greater than my old microwave, but nonetheless, nearly unbelievably my new microwave is simpler to use than the one with just a knob.
The marketplace has come to solve a problem I didn't even really know I had. To make my microwaving life even easier. As with all technology that I buy and love, it is exactly that power of the marketplace that gets me what I want.
What happens if somebody needs to get ahold of me? They call my house and leave a message. It's amazing how that works.
If they made a cell phone *just* for making calls, no extended contracts, a monthly fee of $15 for unlimited use and a phone that costs $50, I'd get a cell phone. Until then, I'll stick to my landline and the ubiquous pay phone.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
How do you turn off an iPod?
Hold down play for 3 seconds!
How do you go to a previous menu?
Press menu
How do you go to the next menu?
Press the button in the center of the dial
How do you change the volume?
With the scroll wheel*
*as long as the display is showing the current song and it's not showing the song's rating or the progress bar (in which case you press the middle button until you see the volume, and THEN you use the scroll wheel)
How do I plug it into the wall?
Use the firewire port -- duh!?!
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod, but removing buttons does not make something more simple.
Changing the context of a button only works when you can change its label too.
"What does this phone do?"
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone book, and has this nifty flashlight."
I could see more people asking WHY the phone has a flashlight than thinking it to be a "Good Feature". Most folks would consider it an unneeded 'bell and whistle' feature that creates an excuse to charge $50 more for the phone. As opposed to:
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone numbers, coordinates with your computer, plays games in full color, takes pictures of anything you see fit to take pictures of, sends them to any email address, allows you to play games whenever you are bored or want to spend sone time, lets you send an IM to unobtrusively keep in touch with your coleagues on the go, allows you to play realistic-sounding music for your ring tones, or even record your OWN sound for your ringer..." (And of course 50 other features that sound cool).
Now, see? THIS would strike people as "It does all that for only $99?! COOL!"... However, being able to -USE- all that without a doctorate is another matter for some folks.
Overall, it's simple: The more things they can put on paper under the "features" section, the more likely folks are to buy it if the price is decent, and they think the features will be fun. They never give the DETAILS of the features that would cause people to reconsider.
For example, when I worked for T-Mobile, I had to explain to folks that yes, they could "download" their address book to their phone, like it said in the features, but they had to do it two entries at a time from the T-Mobile web site. Oh, yes, and it used a SMS message to send each entry (At cost, oftentimes). And of course, nothing quite as fun as dealing with an upset parent whose daughter had used 13,000 SMS Text messages in one month by using AIM on her phone... It seems so SIMPLE, and easy to use... and makes a huge bill.
Overall, people are interested in INTERESTING bells and whistles. "I can get a digital camera for $199 or I can get a PHONE with a diital camera and all these other features for $150...", and a flashlight is not considered 'Interesting' to most people. ("I can get a flashlight for $5, or a phone with one for $150...")
@Whee
Manufacturers need to learn that in the information age (which is now!) they need to put more and more info on their websites.
Every product manual should be on the website in PDF!
Even the products that are ten to fifteen years old!
For an example of the best example of providing info, look at Yamaha. They have scanned every manual for every music synthesizer model and variation that they have made and have put these scans (in PDF format) on their web site for free download. Considering that this is refers to several hundred models each with manuals that have several hundred pages, this is incredible customer support!! I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Yamaha musical instrument new or used, for fear that I couldn't operate it.
Plus they did it knowing that it would take years to pay off in additional sales. Great company.
Now for the chumps! Fry's Electronics gets the price here. Every product , yes every product in the store should have a manual on-line on their website.
And,
Every product that they have ever sold in the past ten years should have the manual on their web site. Plus, there should be links to information that people always need to know when they buy stuff there. Like, what type of memory does this motherboard that is on sale this week use? And, 'Can I use this other type of memory for the motherboard that I bought at Fry's three years ago?'.
Usually at Fry's, nobody knows what the answer to your question is. So people buy the wrong product, can't figure out how to get it working, scoop up most of the parts, and bring it back for a refund. Then they put most of the parts back in the box, put shrinkwrap cellophane around it, and stick it back on the shelves at full price.
The only way to tell if the product at Fry's is a dud is by the ratio of returned units to the previously unsold ones. If half the boxes are user returns, don't buy it or you too will probably be back to return it. Like the saying goes: 'A trip to Fry's is two trips to Fry's'.
This monkeyshit mentality wouldn't be so bad if you're not driving fifteen miles each way.
And they could reduce this nonsense by demanding that each supplier provide a manual in PDF form and a list of FAQ that could be put on the Fry's website before the product goes on sale there.
But would they do it, no ef'in way. They just don't give a fuck!
So what't the point?
MORE DOCUMENTATION!
Of course, people have said this kind of things about lots of products, including amateur 35mm cameras. Strangely enough, some folks went to trouble of learning how to use them anyway. Those folks know how the complicated controls work.
That's when the industry changes the controls in the name of "ease of use", thus alienating not only the beginner, but also the person who knew what they were doing before.
One of the things that pisses me off about my digital camera is that I have to dig through menus to change settings like exposure, f-stop, flash on/off, etc. The camera supports them all in theory, but it is hard to use in practice. Let's see, click here, left, down down down, menu... whoops! Lost the shot.
There are cameras that have these controls now, but in my experience they are unjustifiably more expensive just for that design.
Stick to the metaphor, manufacturing guys. If it's a camera, it should be controlled like a camera, even if there's a computer on the inside. That means knobs and dials and stuff that is quick to get at, makes sense if you know what it does, and can be ignored if you don't. Just like the old days.
It is a question of letting the old dog use the new technology without having to learn the "new trick paradign" too. The functions are the same, why change the controls? What's next, point-and-click blenders?
On the other hand, the next generation of car drivers might need a gamepad instead of a steering wheel...
I see dozens of posts saying "people want simplicity." The article is ostensibly making that very point.
But you know what?
People BUY complexity. They could buy a Mac, but they buy the PC because it has 'more software'. They could buy a simple phone, but they buy the one with all the gee-wizz features. They could pay $10 for shareware, but they want Photoshop and Word.
On top of that, it's hard to make things simple. It costs more to make a product easy to use. (Especially with software, where cramming maximal items into the preferences panel seems to be an industry sport.)
People get what they pay for.
I bought an HDTV-enabled TV (that is, one with a monitor capable of displaying HDTV resolution but without an HDTV receiver) a few months back. In looking around, I found it easy to determine whether the receiver was integrated or not just by looking at the feature card.
So you think that that's not enough? Well, I'm sorry, but I can't see any simpler way that the TV's could be advertised. Maybe you could draw a line in the sand between "HDTV Television Set" and "HDTV-ready Television Set", but you know what? At least among my A/V enthusiast buddies, an HDTV monitor (see above defintition) is an HDTV. If you couldn't be bothered to have a salesman explain it to you in 15 seconds at Best Buy, there you are.
BTW, I'm sure in a Communist society, the companies would be sure to fully inform the customer about HDT- oh, that's right; in a Communist society you wouldn't have HDTV. I forgot. Maybe you're ascribing the evils of humanity to capitalism.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I'll give you one word: design.
The quote at the end of the article gets it right: "The simpler it looks," Nielsen said, "the harder it is to build." Great design exudes simplicity, but it's surprising hard to get right. The iPod did a good job, by focusing on making music, and music alone, available through a simple interface. (I despaired to find you could maintain a calendar and play games on an iPod, but who does that? Fortunately these unnecessary features didn't interfere with the design too much.) My DirecTV DVR gets it mostly right too -- I shudder to think of all the things they could have added (partial show recording? a trashcan? games?) and I'm glad they didn't.
On the other hand (and as the article points out) every cellphone I've seen in the last two years has been a failure. The failure is not in QA, and it's not in documentation. It's certainly not in the user. The failure is in design.
Of course many people would prefer not having a transmitter that can "punch" through a house millimeters from their brain...
KISS is the direct result of progress. Or a byproduct if you prefer.
Most designs go from simple to complicated to simple again.
A point in case is the computer interface. It has gone from command line to graphical interface, over time the gui has become so feature laden that in the end there was a demand for simplicity again.
Which BTW is far from the same as dumbing it down, a case in point being OS X which allows for extreme complexity but by doing Simple Stupid gestures.
Thus, I think we should follow KISS as much as we can, developers, engineers, product designers should always be on the lookout to incorporate existing complications and try to re-invent them in simple stupid ways.
Who doesn't like Rendezvous? It does extremely clever things with let's face it complicating protocols. And it allows for really cool things, like sharing pictures and music libraries over a network with a simple click.
That's another definition of progress: not just making technology, but making technology available.
(disclaimer: this is of course a very narrow definition of progress, since it doesn't enhance well being or general happiness, but you get my drift)
I think, therefore I am...I think.
In short: get the customers' heads into the real world.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
My buddy tells me he thinks the best user interface company is...Fischer-Price. Think about it--they literally make UIs that even a two-year old can figure out.
I did a bit of HCI (Human-Computer Interface) studying in college, and one approach always appealed to me. It's the tiered approach. Here's how it works.
You're designing the UI for a widget. Find out how the simplest users are going to use the thing. Those functions get special buttons, the easiest navigation, big and prominent. Then you figure out how intermediate users are going to use the product. Those functions are given one-touch buttons and placed off to the side in the hunt'n'peck section (include your own "huntin' pecker" joke here).
Then there's the geeks. These features you can bury deep in menus that require special codes to get to them ("press slash, dot, enter the feature code, and you'll be transported to a menu..."). This always seems to make people happy. Look at the TiVo remote. Like the guy in the article said, he uses pause the most. The biggest button on TiVo? Pause. Big, yellow, right in the center.
Then there's products where you don't have any single group of "simplest" users. Some of these people are buying it to do X, and some Y. In that case, you ask them up front what type of user they are and...whatever functions they're going to use the most get the most prominent places. This strategy is not always possible, but I've yet to see it fail where it has been applicable.
sevbut have you considered the following argument: shut up.