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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?"
10,000 songs,
audiophile quality,
least restrictive DRM,
6 buttons,
iPod.
Of course, on the other hand:
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
What can be done to make manufacturers get their heads into the real world?
Um, ok. So, let me get this straight. You want these manufacturers to _not_ take advantage of the people dumb enough to believe they are buying something else. Those 15% of the people that think that they have an HDTV, probably bought something that was overpriced, and might end up buying equipment that would only work to it's fullest with a HDTV system. They're making money off of the stupid. I don't expect them to change. While it would be moral and nice of them to, but since when is capitalism moral and nice? It's about money, and if someone wants to give it to them, they will take it.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
A flashlight would be cool, though. It would require minimal extra lighting. The phone battery is more than capable of driving an excellent LED light. I actually *need* a flashlight on a regular basis, and I always have my phone with me. It seems like a perfect match.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The problem is that many of these gadgets are still in the process of being defined. Any manufacturer who decides to relax because their product doesn't need more features will go under.
I'm old enough to feel satisfied with a mobile phone that can be used only to place and receive calls, but my kids certainly aren't.
There's darwinism for you.
Snebjorn
Faster-Harder-Louder
who are simply impressed by complication. Rube Goldberg devices actually have a market. Maybe not a huge all encompassing market, but a market nonetheless.
As an engineer I appreciate simplicity and it's much, much harder to design a simple device that does the same thing as a complicated one.
One of the things I do is design and build human powered machinery. I have a particular fondness for Human Powered Vehicles. I've played around with a lot of front suspension designs, mostly just for fun and personal edification, but the one that's really serious has the entire front suspension whittled down to a single part. Just one. A shaped composite leaf spring with a bit of damping material in its core. The two front wheels (it's a trike, two in front, one in back. Morgan style) basically just get stuck on the ends of the spring.
People who look at my machines completely ignore this lovely bit of work and Ooo and Ahhhh over all the complicated tubular multilink stuff that I put together more as a testbed for formula car suspension systems.
If I were to sell my machines I'd hazard a guess that the complicated beast would outsell the superiour, but simpler machine.
See all those folks out riding the paved roads on 40 pound, double suspension, downhill mountain bikes and wondering why they can't keep up with their friend's rusty old "ten speed"?
KFG
In fact those phones are sold in very small margins.
Surely you jest. I mean, yeah, you can get some of those phone for free or $19.95, but only with a 2+ year contract. That's where the money is made, the contract and the air-time. The phone cost is built in.
Go check what the phones cost without contract. A very basic "free" phone costs well over $100 if you buy it outright. That's not a small margin sale if you ask me.
Yes, but they didn't require one.
I've gotten sick of trying to figure out all the features on electronic devices... or worse, helping my wife with hers. I've got a phone that has all kinds of cool stuff, some of which I actually use, 'cause it's there, but at the end of the day, I use the thing to call people, and if every other feature not related to making phone calls were taken away, I wouldn't care.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I work for a wireless carrier and can tell you one basic reason phone manufactures add these features. Wireless carriers ask for them! The wireless carriers want these features in the phones they sell so they can charge you for the services that go along with them. Who wants MMS if you don't have pictures to send? Who wants wireless internet if you don't have a web browser? The bottom line is that phone manufacturers don't sell phones to the end users, they sell them to wireless carriers.
- Less battery life
- Not easily viewable in sunlight
- Not water resistant (even I don't understand this one!)
Manufacturers seem to have forgotten the purpose of mobile phones.Same issue with laptops. I have an pismo laptop from 4 years ago with as much as 10 hours of battery life. If there exists such a system today, I'll buy it but marketeers find it easier to push Ghz, so we get Ghz. This reminds me of radios from the 1960s when boasting "10 transistors" was so important that some manufacturers soldered in dummy transistors!
/sarcasm on...
/sarcasm off...
Wait, dragging a file to the trash will delete it. So won't dragging a disk to the trash delete the disk?
The Mac UI is not the most consistant thing in the universe.
My other first post is car post.
funny on my last consulting job the people I worked with had all these very high tech japanese phones that did everything, but when we went into the elevators or below ground at the Chicago Daley Center their phones would stop working, but my very basic butt-ugly Motorola V120 was the only thing that could work. I'd rather spend money on having low-signal strength sensitivity than web browsing, cameras, modem jack, games, custom ring tunes & all that other crap
I have a professor who mentioned his cell is years old because all the new, small phones can't punch a signal through his house. He likes the big numbers and easy to hit buttons as well. I bet all the people I see at work during lunch time desperately trying to get a call out by standing near the window and finally going outside would appreciate it more than size as well.
> You want these manufacturers to _not_ take advantage of the people dumb enough to believe they are buying something else.
Heh, reminds me of when I used to work at Best Buy and they would make us try to push Monster Cables on every customer because of their "superior sound quality". Make them pay an extra $40 for cables of which the average person couldn't hear any improvement. I always thought those Monster cables were such a scam.
The problem isn't really simplicity vs. complexity (as far as the consumer goes). It is an inability to customize at a reasonable cost.
It is infinitely easier to make one product with every bell and whistle known to mankind, than build several products to fill a nitch markets (economies of scale and so forth). Manufacturers are keeping it simple as far as production goes: build One with Everything. Every feature a consumer (god I hate that word) wants is included, and that same model fills the demands of another consumer even though their needs are different.
Well, except for simplicity, but that is a really small segment of the market.
Also, price of admission. Value is sometimes denoted by how many features I could buy with x amount of dollars. As the list of features goes up, the perceived value also increases. It doesn't matter if I use those features or not; I am getting more for the same amount of money; an increase in value.
Scaling that backwards, a simple product becomes nearly worthless to sell. If x product has all these features, a person (much better word) nearly expects a significant reduction in price if product y doesn't have all those features. Except product x was sold with a specific price point in mind. To sell below that is unprofitable.
Example: when I was shopping around for a HD, the best price I could find for a 20GB (what I needed) and a 120GB were nearly the same. To sell the 20 GB at a comparative price would be around $24. Not even worth the cost of shipping at that point. Regardless of the number of features, the entry price of any product stays relatively static. A good CPU would cost the same today as five years ago (around $400). Except I can't even give my old one away. Scaling backwards makes it completely worthless.
Got to agree with you here. Officially at work we aren't allowed to have cameras or recording devices. Unfortunately my palm (tungsten t) and phone (nokia 3650) both break these rules. I looked around for a good phone with just bluetooth and to be honest I'm having a tough time looking for anything without a camera anymore. I'm having to buy a discontinued model (t39 from Ericsson). I'm at a government site but I can't imagine that they are the only ones banning these technologies.
I have to agree with this. Although the manual might be useful to reveal seldom-used or very specific features, the basic operation of any device should be intuitive. How can this be done? Doesn't everyone have their own idea of what's "intuitive"?
After reading the book "The Design of Everyday Things" (ISBN 0465067107) it seems that there is less involved in an intuitive interface than one might think. The main problem is that seldom is there any thought put into how to make something intuitive-- instead things get built based on the least amount of effort, even if it's only a very small amount of additional effort to make things easy to use.
After reading this book, I now see all kinds of examples of bad design that could have been easily fixed with just a tiny amount of effort, or things that could have been made intuitive with the exact same amount of effort, but making it intuitive simply wasn't even a consideration.
For example, where I live there are several light switches in a three-gang box that control different lights. They are wired randomly, and I'm always mis-guessing which switch goes with which light. A better design, which would have taken the exact same amount of effort would have been to wire the light on the left from the point of view of the box with the left-hand switch. Put the light on the right in the right-hand switch, etc. In fact, when I get "around to it" I plan to rewire them this way.
As another example, some other switches are horizontal. Push the right side they come on, push the left they go off. Unfortunately the door to the room is on the right. This means that I'm always pressing the switch against the normal direction of movement as I come in or leave the room. Again, for zero additional effort they could have been wired so that they're operated in the same direction as normal movement.
These are the sorts of thoughts that book will provoke. Recommended reading for anyone who is at all interested in how things work.
The average IQ is 100 and this average represents a huge portion of the desired customers and anything more than ten percent off that mark (either way) will miss the intended target audience.
Modern high tech devices are getting more and more complex and difficult to understand from a conceptional point of view. The average consumer is hopelessly lost when it comes to understanding any of today's high end tech stuff.
The stuff is designed by incredibly smart people, but usually they don't know the average consumer's way of thinking, which is why dumb devices like iPods are so successful: They can be handled by the average joe.
I want a single device that is essentially a hand held computer. Screen should be one of those new flexi ones so it be a decent size but still roll in/out of a compact device. The phone would just be one of the features. And, of course, it would run linux.
Don't add features to phones, make phone a feature.
That article lost me the minute the guy started talking about how his camera was too technologically advanced because it had options to force the flash or set long exposure times.
These are options that have been available on cameras for approximately 100 years.
I mean, we have gotten to the point where if technology does not simplify our lives to a ridiculous degree, we blame the technology, even if technology is giving us the same exact features we've always had! What was fine before suddenly becomes burdensome simply because it's digital and our expectations are different. Do we expect to have fewer features in digital products than we did in analog, simply because we're too stupid or impatient to read a damn manual? It seems that way.
I'd like to keep my long exposure, manual focus, forced flash and aperture modes, thanks. I am happy camera makers are continuing to provide these as options on some models and are even filtering them down to less expensive consumer cameras. Not every product needs to pander to the lowest common denominator.
I've been reading halfway through the comments (what, you expect me to read the article?) and it suddenly grabbed me that a lot of people were complaining about features.
And some other people pointed out that people ask for features.
Yet at the same time we want things to be simple.
Well, I like lots and lots of features, but I want them to be simple. That's why I for instance Love Photoshop and won't use Gimp. Photoshop has more features though...
OK, I'm moving away from computer programs to avoid religious discussions...
My wife and I both have the cheapest, simplest phones around. They share the same feature set (games, diddly tunes, whatever), but mine has a Nokia-like interface, hers a weird one. Mine is simple, hers is complex.
Same features, same product, mine simple, hers complex. She uses hers every day, but still can do some things better on my phone, while they are quite different in approach.
It's not the amount of features, it's the DESIGN. That's what KISS means. There are more than enough one function devices around that are really really complex, bad or plain stupid (simple stupid: good. plain stupid: bad).
That's btw the difference between a good gui and a dumb-it-down pretty pictures approach.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
No, I'm afraid not. Other than posting on a few select forums and doing some work on other people's websites I am virtually invisible to the web.
No blog. No personal website.
I'm afraid I rather like it that way.
I don't do anything particularly revolutionary though. It's a fairly well worn field. You might want to look into playing with elastomers to replace the coilover. They have their limitations but they're interesting nonetheless and if used perspicaciously result in some rather different layouts than coilovers do since they can be placed differently, be molded into various shapes and be made up in mulitple layers each with different properties. Most people's dissatisfaction with them comes from just using them as a coil replacment. Various torsion devices are also unduly overlooked. Check out the front suspension on the Lotus 72. Modern materials also open up the possiblity of very short leaf springs incorporated directly in the suspension arms themselves, flexible but solid bits replacing spherical bearings or other types of mechanical pivots. Ferrari did this on an F1 a few years ago (banned as not complying with the letter of the rules, although it really didn't violate the spirit).
I haven't built anything like a sand rail in 30 years, but you'll probably find the coil over the 98% solution because of the suspension travel needed. They've become the default method for a reason. I only work on pavement pounders these days where the limitations of certain systems never really get pronounced.
But as you say, it's fun just to do new things.
KFG
So some people can't figure out how to use the things they buy. Too bad. I say add more features. Many features require little in the way of additional hardware. Why not include them even if they're not used often? Granted, sometimes there are bad interfaces but a bad interface is better than NO interface!
It's sad. Look at what happened to digital watches. They're much more reliable than analog watches and they died only because people couldn't figure out how to set them to the correct time.
On a similar note, I'm beginning to hate PowerPoint. Why does everything have to be broken into bite size pieces? Give me high density information. I'm a big boy. I can read a white paper.
I bought a Zenith (JVC) Vcr in 1985 for over $500. It was one of the first Hi-Fi VCR's. One of the stereo channels has died on it and I have to use it in Mono, but it's still usable. What these companies need to consider and/or learn, is there are people out there that are willing to pay for quality and/or simplicity if it were available. Unfortunately, they are more interested in meeting a particular price point in manufacture because the herd of "consumers" are only looking at the price when considering a purchase. When looking at the plethora of consumer (god I hate that term) electronics, It is almost impossible to find quality built products anymore. Everybody's gone to the disposable "don't worry it will be outdated before it wears out" mentality. Bull. If they built it worth a crap, it would last until that particular user decides that it is outdated. I mean I'm still using a stereo system I bought in 1982! It still serves it's function. About the features, (trying to stay on topic), there are many features of this particular VCR I have never used. The point being, The remote was so intuitive I never had to read the manual or went through a long learning process to do what I wanted it to do. Even when I tried out some of the "fancy" options, I didn't need the manual. I just decided I didn't need those features. Another post said it wasn't about the GUI. I say it's definately about the GUI. Simplicity of use is where it's at. Why do you think TIVO's sell so well?
Because it IS! You just view the TV guide and press a button. It's GUNNA record! You want to record every NEW Simpson's? Easy! Tivo is infinitely easier then doign it on a VCR. Also, she can just watch TV and thumbs up and thumbs down and it will records things she likes. Then it's just a matter of scrolling through the TEXT list of what was recorded! DAMN easy.
Gorkman
Phones seem to have gotten more complex; perhaps there is hope they emerge as the dominant pocket appliance - it seems sure something will emerge as such, at least to me. I don't want to have to worry about carrying more than one device and yes it would be nice if it had a flashlight and also unlocked my car and started it too.
So, whoever said it is right, phones are getting more complex. This is probably ok if you really think about it.
CD players aren't really, and the same goes for VCRs and DVD players. They can all now be had very very cheaply in their most simple form. This is, I think, a good thing. One might argue, they've been around longer as consumer appliances and they've figured KISS out.
But, I'm not seeing a whole lot of KISS in the software world. Especially in the Windows world.
With the exception of most decent and I mean really decent *nix software, most software seems to have gone on a sugar and steroid fad diet for nearly the past few decade.
Ever see MSDOS 2.2 run on a multi gighertz modern machine? Try it. It's scary fast. What happened?
Ten years ago I used to setup internet stuff in people houses for a local ISP. It was a good way to make $100/hr as it really didn't take more than 45 minutes anyway. I carried around Netscape on one flopy, Eudora, Trumpet Winsock, ftp, telnet and talk on the other floppy.
Quark was 3 megs. Then it was 7 megs. Now it's 300. Is it 100x better? Fuck no, it's not even as good.
Fit enough for an internet setup on a floppy? I'm not sure you could get it to fit on one CD these days.
If any of you out there actually write this stuff: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? HAVE YOU NO PRIDE?
"Hello World!" Shouldn't be 7 frikkin megs because you're pulling in God knows what class libraries, this can be 42 byte program if you really try.
I swear Windows apps had to go through 3 or 4 generations of hardware upgrades just to get back to as fast as they were before they all went "true 32 bit" and I cringe at the prospect of 64 and maybe even 128 bit apps.
One of the computers I use is a W98 system on fairly contemporary hardware. I still use 3 or 4 16-bit Windows programs I've been carrying with me for over a decade now. They're small, fast do what I want and nothing more.
And all 3 fit on one floppy with room to spare.
I dunno about thit object oriented class library stuff, I really don't know. I wish more people would learn assembler below the C level than keep wanting to go above it with "easier" and "more powerful" languages; I think it's ill advised.
Short term pain for long term gain: you should probably suffer writing software so I don't have to when using it.
Need Mercedes parts ?