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The Curse of Knowledge Bogs Down Innovation
Secret of Raising Smart Kids writes ""I have a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too," says David Heath, co-author of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." The "curse of knowledge," is the paradox that as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off because the walls of the box we think inside of thicken along with our experience. An article in the NY Times proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, "it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems." Another solution is to force yourself to become a beginner again like making yourself shoot basketball left-handed."
No, his DVD remote has 52 buttons on it because people will really sit down and learn all of those ff/rew/2x/4x/slo-mo/repeat/A-B/loop functions in order to more efficiently find and view the naughty bits of movies.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I thought it was fairly standard when doing usability trials to include a wide range of users, with a wide range of abilities. What's good for the n00b might not be right for a poweruser.
As to self handicapping, we were encouraged do that at judo practice when we were kids - when practicing against a smaller or less experienced opponent, you don't use your best techniques. This cuts both ways, he gets a fair go and you improve your weak areas.
Finally, the reason it has 52 buttons is probably because a competitor's had 51.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"An article in the NY Times proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track."
So someone's going to hire Slashdot?
There, that is the summation of the summery, we all know most slashdotters gave up even "reading the fantastic summery" years ago.
It is a basic principle of ergonomics. It is also very true. I see users (and myself) frustrated all the time with stupid or confusing designs. Buttons that don't make sense, user interfaces with too many choices, missing features, badly categorized menus, poorly written or absent documentation, etc. A current trend in electronics is to "dumb down" the device to make it "friendly", by chopping out useful features. That is a mistake! You can have all the features, just organize them well! Resist the urge to make them all visible at once! If necessary, add "user level" modes like "basic" and "advanced".
Every now and then I end up with something so well designed and thought-out it is amazing. At first one doesn't even notice the great- it just "works" and you get done what you need, effortlessly. All the features you need are there, easy to find, well documented. Makes you want to scream at some manufacturers "Hey, look at this product. THIS is how to do it." (I know, you want an example.... OK, the TiVo fits into that category for me.)
It is difficult for people to pretend to be other people- to have different skill sets, capabilities, thought processes.
I've done it with my business (computer consulting) in the past and it can work. Of course, it can also go horribly wrong - it depends entirely on the person and the situation. You can't parachute someone with no skills at all into an intense consulting situation but I've hired people with some minimal IT experience and it has made my business better because of it. Even if they do not immediately contribute to the bottom line they can make the business stronger.
In my case, hiring the best "generalist" IT consultants has consistently led me towards a company full of gifted but undisciplined (including me) staff. I have hired a couple of very disciplined but marginal IT people in the recent past as their adherence to ordering and overall work flow have made the company stronger. In such a situation you usually have to give them a lot of support and keep the other staff from grousing too loudly about it but it can work.
I expect it is a pretty old trick really.
I thought having 'non technical' people review products was common practice ( unless you are from china ). I have always done that. Including their input in the beginning and throughout the life of development is also standard.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I just tried again to teach my elderly parents to use the DVD I gave them for christmas Not only does the remote have tiny buttons with tiny text, each manufacturer of DVD's work differently, many of them will never play unless you press some buttons. Inexcuseable. Try to explain between screen formats to an 82 year old.
The lack of self-objectivity is a big problem here. Not only remotes, but for software as well.
All you really need to do is to a) either care about the project personally, or b) take context changing tests by acting "dumb" in lack of a better term. That is, you trace a context from a direct feeling such as; "right now I want to change the channel". What do I do? How do I do that? Well, since changing channels is universal, that shouldn't be hard at all, so on to testing other features..
As a GOOD designer, you really have to understand that the product shouldn't draw too much attention to itself or require too much from you. It's a tool! Nothing more! As a tool, it should be close to transparent how it handles. Thus it should be obvious in the normal contexts of use.
Just do context tests for features, because the context more clearly shows what is missing.. You'll do that if you care anyway.
I didn't read TFA but it seems naive to believe that there are such "teams of experts" designing remote controls and whatnot. Here's the thing: Consumers don't think about usability at all when they buy, and as a simple consequence of that no time or effort is spent on it.
I was talking to a friend who has just spent thousands on a very nice looking oven/hobb. To my dismay (but not my surprise) it still has the hobb controls in a straight line, not in any way related to the layout of the hobb rings themselves, meaning that she will still make mistakes turning the wrong ring off or up, burning food and so on, and she'll constantly have to look at the tiny diagrams by each control to try to work out which hobb ring it corresponds to.
Meanwhile the light switches in her new half-million-pound house are grouped together randomly so you have to experiment by switching lights on and off at random until you hit the right switch.
Her fridge has a temperature control that goes from '-' to '+'. Is that "more heat" or "more refrigeration"?
Oh, and all the power sockets in the house are at floor level, not convenient waist or hand height. Her DVD/TV remote probably has 50 unused buttons on it (I didn't look).
These are #1 usability problem with hobbs, light switches, fridges, power points, etc.; there are books written about it, yet you can't buy an oven, light switch, or new house which doesn't have these problems.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
More the lack of knowledge, or at least the application of it.
Some causes:
– unnecessary time pressure at 'lower levels' due to lack of planning capabilities at 'higher levels'
– general focus on speed (seen as reduction of cost) rather than quality
– expulsion of elderly above 35 from processes, thereby loosing on 'corporate knowledge'
– focus on specialised training, view of general education as a burden and a waste of time
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
summery means something else and you probably wanted to use summary.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
This isn't meant to troll Microsoft but I've spent the night fighting with a Microsoft Firewall and various other XP related hassles. I really seriously wonder if it wouldn't do their engineers some good to force them to use DOS 6.2 and a Unix based system for a week a month. Windows has gotten so bloated and cumbersome I think it'd do them some good to see how a more straightforward OS functions. What they seem to have into their heads is we all can't wait to get the new version of Windows. The problem is most of us don't use an OS we use software and all the bloat is slowing down the software and creating nightmarish stability problems. My windows software crashes several times an hour on average where as the Mac it's several times a month. This isn't trying to troll Windows in favor of Mac but Mac went back to a Unix type OS and gained a lot of stability doing it, not to mention security. The more crap you pile ontop the more holes form. They need to strip it back to the bone and preferrably take a page from Apple and start over. They're kind of like a frieghter at this point so turning around will be slow and painful but they blew their chance with Vista so instead and following Mac they kept piling on the code and now it takes up drastically more drive space, ram and it's slower. Why is this a surprise? I still say NT 3.51 was the best OS I ever used. It was stable and for the time fairly easy to use. They were headed in the right direction but they strayed off the path. I was a devoted Windows user back then and laughed when my Mac friends tried to convince me it was superior. It wasn't back then but a lot has changed and Windows needs to get back to it's roots. DOS may not have been user friendly but it was lean and stable.
We are not all right-handed, you know.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Great, if outsourcing wasn't enough, now we have to worry about the boss randomly firing you to hire someone with no experience whatsoever. Next in Ask Slashdot: Are You Hiring?
This only works if you have enough people with an open mind on your team. Especially when you are doing innovation, this requirement should be on top. So the problem is: getting enough people with an open mind that are willing to let go of some - even basic - principles. If the team does not comply to that; well, forget it. It is very important that this free thinking is supported by the company you work for (at mine, I've got the feeling that it isn't anymore). On top of that you need a good control structure so that projects don't get out of hand, and beneath it you need people with less creativity, but strong work ethics. After you've set up the structure, then you can think about introducing "strangers" to the design team, not before. After that: think of use cases and work from there.
I work in a software development environment, and a new tester is a godsend in evaluating software usability. As much as testers try to evaluate new features from the user's perspective, after a while we become too familiar with the program. A new viewpoint can sometimes point out an obvious flaw that would otherwise be overlooked.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Age is a fever chill every physicist must fear;
:)
He's better dead than living still,
once he's past his thirtieth year.
(on the tendency of physics people to be most productive in their youngest years)
I'll graduate when I'm 29. One year of productivity!
We can all agree that 52 buttons is too many for a remote control and that 95% of the features of Microsoft Word are wasted. But we can't agree on which buttons or Word features are critical.
Software makes it cheap to add features (especially if design is outsourced to India/China) and mass marketing makes added features seem valuable. Each added feature/button adds another 1% to the market because it attracts people who think they need added feature X. Selling another 10,00, 100,00, or a million players because of some feature makes adding a button very profitable. The result is a race toward complexity. Meanwhile, a select few companies buck the trend and do succeed through simplicity (usually called elegance) such as the original Palm Pilot and Apple's iPod. Unfortunately, most companies seem to be riding the complexity merry-go-round.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
so I'll try doing something else with my left hand instead.
We have loads of outsiders with absolutely no experience or knowledge of the product at all... we call them managers. The fact that the DVD has so many buttons is more a reflection on the consumer..they want more buttons. Somehow buttons is associated with sophistication to the majority. If there are two DVD players, and one has more buttons on the remote, they will go for that one. Personally, I would be so happy if they had a DVD with no remote... you put in the DVD, and it started playing the movie. There could even be a button on the machine to pause it (since you are most probably getting up when you want to pause it anyway).
Such practices have been commonplace in academia for decades - collaboration with academics outside one's research area, who see things differently. The best academics are those who can pick up enough of a new area to be able to come up with useful ideas, either ab initio or through cross-fertilisation with work with which they are already familiar.
This is a problem well beyond just Engineering and computers. It is normally do the fact that most people think that everyone else is smarter then them. So if everyone else who they perceive as smarter then them does it that way so should they. Financial markets show this a lot. An investment which is doing good and has no signs of problems suddenly come crashing down after a big firm gets rid of the asset (sometimes for reasons that are not negative to the investment, such as needing cash, mitigating risk, etc...) but the other guys see this happening and go into a sell frenzy thinking this guy knows something then I should get rid of it too.... Things like this happen all the time and sometimes with huge disaster Such as the Asian Financial crisis in the 1990's.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Creativity is the combination of two or more things that have never been put together before. It therefore follows that the more knowledge you have the more creative you can be. Your example of a poorly designed remote has nothing to do with creativity. It's an example of poor design. Your conclusion is wrong and you seem to just be fishing for headlines. Go do your homework before you post again.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Pretty much the whole article is a fluff piece, pushing the concept that hiring a consultant with no specific skills would be a good idea. Zero-gravity thinkers is just another way of promoting the consultant business. They aren't any more likely to contribute creativity and innovation than your employees. The only reason they might be successful is they aren't bogged down with all the extra headaches your employees have to deal with. It's very unlikely your employees have been tasked with being creative and innovating. Most likely they have been asked to perform jobs that have little to do with that. If you want your people to innovate, then you have to make that their job.
The engineers that made the remote with 52 buttons on it were tasked with making a remote. The DVD player had 52 functions, so it's no surprise the remote ends up with that many buttons. If on the other hand the engineers were told to design a remote that was easier to use and was innovative, it's very likely they could. It's not necessary to bring in some random outsider to say the emperor has no clothes. You just have to give your existing employees the freedom to do that.
If it has buttons (a la DVD remote) coat them with a substance that easily rubs off. Whatever buttons haven't been pressed (i.e. still have substance on them) after 5 minutes of boss-time, remove them as they will never be used by other people. If the "on" switch is one of these, toss the prototype as it's obvious no-one will ever use it.
BTW, it goes without saying that they'll never read the instruction manual - except to pick up spelling mistooks, so better leave that out too.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A real analogy perhaps? In my misspent youth I roadied for rock bands. Back then, in the "Punk Rock" genre, it was fairly evident that pretty much any fool could play guitar (unlike, say, drums or horns). I used to make up nice melodies and could hum or whistle them and have a musician duplicate them on an instrument, writing actual tunes in collaboration. Any way, I decided to learn to play guitar. After several months of practice, I discovered that the melodies in my head would no longer come out. I was limited by my rudimentary skill as a guitarist, even if I didn't have a guitar in hand, my brain was stuck in the one or two keys I (sort of) knew. So my tunes became extremely clunky and boring. Interesting phenomena. BTW the shooting baskets ploy is sort of like what I did if I muffed a chord change in practice, I found it very helpful to run through the chord progression backwards, sort of de-constructing my mistakes. I still can't play very well, But my pro musician friends all say my chord changes are pretty clean.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I grew up in a cheap tract house from the 1970s, and even those builders got it right. The old (old!) rule for US electricians is that you wire the switches so that when you are looking at the switch plate, the left most switch controls the left-most fixture from your point of view. Draw a line out from your body thru the structure to each fixture and the work is done for you.
It shouldn't be too hard or expensive to get someone to reconfigure those switches.
Blar.
Retard.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Usability testing is something every well-intentioned planner puts on the schedule at the start of a project. But, unless the project manager knows to take opportunities as they come,and can tolerate some sidelong glances about spending money on frivolous things when the project has delays and resource shortages to make up in implementation, it is often cut down or eliminated.
A problem with abbreviated usability testing is that bad test design creeps in because it is cheaper: Why ask if a focus group delivers meaningful results when it surely delivers the appearance of having made an effort. This kind of bad testing can even crowd out inexpensive "bench top" testing: Are the controls sized and spaced correctly? Are the colors and typography right for readability? Why care about that if the focus group testers don't.
Mistakes in designing-in and implementing better usability don't come from lack of effort, but from lack of direction or lack of leadership that can weigh the value of getting it right. If the results of usability testing don't yield more than superficial issues with cheap fixes that don't challenge project priorities, odds are you have traveled the same road as most mediocre products.
Something like the DVD remote's buttons are a pathology that is easy to trace: The product manager, who has no design inputs when he writes the competitive analysis, lists the union of all competitors' features - usually expressed by their surface manifestation in buttons. When did you ever read a bug report that says: "The market requirements, functional spec, and design spec, are all wrong because they never questioned the number of buttons."
Unless you have a group of people determined to break out of that trap, good design can only be accidental. The system is rigged against it. Throwing in a consultant who questions assumptions is a way of adding more rolls of the dice that could, by chance, break out of that trap, but it is not a solution. The only path to a reliable solution is to change the process.
I wrote parts of this stuff
no one forced him to buy a remote with 52 buttons, altho it is true that for many items you can't buy simple things
/.ers are aware that GM and ford make a LOT more money from large SUVs and luxury cares, on both an absolute and percent basis, then from, say, a malibu or taurus.
the example of an oven (what the hell is a hobb ?) - a very few people, like S Jobs, are willing to try and fail with new things; most manufactureres are scared to death to do anything different, cause it might lead to a downturn in sales
I agree, the linear relation of knobs is bad, and every year probably leads to a few burns when the wrong burner gets turned on - so why no improvement
maybe, the free market needs some guidance or nudge or push from govt (gasp !!)
people who make stuff are stupid: Sturgeon's rule: the american sci fi writer T Sturgeon was asked why most sci fi writing is so bad, and he said, 99% of everything is BS - in this case, a lot of the people making this stuff are stupid
Consumers put up with it - do you see people rebelling ? major rebellions are rare; i remember the 80s, when the fashion world tried to sell miniskirts for buisness clothing; the fashion industry righlty lost huge sums of money.
Consumers don't like change (/.ers are not normal) - go into any store that sells standard sutff like appliances and anything new will languish, or be a special high priced niche item. there are of course a lot of exceptions, but this is a good general rule.
It is not that easy to just say, try something different - unless you have tried, don't be glib and say something that sounds easy like bring in people who are not trained
it is exspensive to it different; people constantly demand the lowest price, which means you need super high volume of manufacture and you can't spend money to do redesign
you make money by margin (RATIO sales/cost) so there is tremendous pressure to get the consumer to buy higher priced feature laden stuff; I am sure that all
If you make 5 bucks on a 52 button control, and 1 buck on a 10 button control, what you gonna sell ?
of course, you can come up with a million counter examples, but these are some good guides.
sellers make more money by bundling wanted features with unwanted (packages on autos anyone ?)
There is a very, very, very simple solution: just don't buy it
It worked with beta/vhs - consumers got one format, and it will probably work with HD/blueray
don't like complicated stuff, just don't buy it
Its certainly valuable and applies to both working practices and design. It won't always happen however - here are some random notes from my experience.
If managing:
i) Timing : If a team is under a lot of pressure then expect resentment on both sides if an idea filled newcomer is introduced. The existing team will appear entrenched and the newcomer disruptive.
ii) Skills and Personality : Many people will be defensive about their work, some will be quite aggressive if not approached in the appropriate way. Even if open however, its a tough balance between being encouraging yet ensuring the newcomer is taking on-board enough of the current way of working to become effective quickly.
If an incumbent:
i) Enact some easy suggestions immediately : Shows they are being listened to even if they only offer marginal technical improvement.
ii) Avoid historical defences : If a feature or practice has a bloody history then don't continue it by passing it on. It will sound defensive to explain it and the newcomer will become inhibited. One exception is if its a live political issue but even then I have found the opinion of untainted newcomers useful in resolving conflicts.
iii) Dramatic changes : These are when you most likely going to react badly but also offer the greatest potential. If it sounds like a terrible idea, be aware that your pride may be clouding your judgement. I use a mixture of explaining the reasoning for the current way of working and talking through the alternative. Important to avoid a conclusion and agree to pursue it at a later date.
If the newcomer:
i) Be charitable : If X seems terribly misguided to you then ask appropriate questions. Be aware that some questions will appear as a thinly veiled "X is terribly misguided" despite your efforts
ii) Watch your ego : you may see simple obvious improvements everywhere - don't assume this is because you are smarter than the incumbents
iii) Gauge your new team : take into account the reaction your suggestions will have. Don't try an prove anything with the quantity and quality of your suggestions. Identify when people will be at their most receptive.
Great, with this proposal my remote control won't provide me with the access to advanced features that I use because some off-the-street idiot doesn't understand the difference between PCM and THX II?
Procrustean feature limitation is NOT the answer. Maybe providing two remotes, one for Dummies and one for people who actually want to use their equipment - maybe.
Most people learn to not mess with things they don't understand on a full-featured remote. And you know what? That is a good lesson in life. The universe does not provide a 'for dummies' interface.
With two remote controls, one could be made easy with most used features (power control, menu buttons, play/stop/pause/ff/fr and the setup button) and the other one with plenty of buttons for brainy people that use all the features made available to them.
Wouldn't that be the best of the two worlds?
...and more NY Times craptastic reporting. The article language specifics negatively target technical types
Yet, the article fails to detail how managers/executives marginalize innovative engineering:
- failure to understand the implications of the technology thus removing the truly innovative aspect
- failure of marketing to understand the implications of subtle innovation and focusing on flashy, shallow FEATURES (aka buttons)
- failure of management to break the focus groups from their bias during product testing
- failure by management to assemble internal review groups without succumbing to the political minions
I give the non-technical people in this world a choice: a DVD remote with 52 buttons; or subsistence farming where sticks and rocks are their daily tools. Now quit your complaining.Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
IMO consumer electronics are a market that's firmly in the grip of the 'race to the bottom' where new versions of the same gadget are shoveled out the door with minimal effort in an attempt to make money when the margins are razor-thin.
bring outsiders with no experience onto teams
Various groups of people within the one-in-a-1000 to one-in-a-million IQ societies have been making this argument for years. "I may not know your business but hire me as a consultant because I'm smart." I think the success of the argument has been stunningly underwhelming.
There is a reason why we are stuck in one place for 40 years. Same energy sources, same engines, same everything, just improvement but no innovation. Brightest minds busy improving mobile phones and thinking of cute ways to abuse AJAX instead of brining real solutions to the world. You had TV ? No you get it Flat ! You had audio recording ? Now get it digital ! It used to be - "Now we can fly !" "We have entered space !" "Nuclear Power is here" . We are living in the most boring times in the last 200 years.
My Starcraft 2 Blog
If you can't think outside the box, you aren't a skilled thinker. And if you aren't a skilled thinker, you aren't a skilled problem solver. And if you aren't a skilled problem solver, you aren't a good solution provider.
So in order to be a good IT solution provider, you have to be able to think outside the box to begin with. You had to learn things and think in new and strange ways to get there, why can't that continue in your job/career?
You also need to have some talent for interface design. And some luck doesn't hurt either.
I'm 99% sure that designing simple, effective interfaces is harder than designing complex interfaces or bad interfaces, not easier. I have my doubts that adding one more incompetent to the design effort based solely on their not knowing much is likely to help as much as the article suggests.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
And then it's there. So what next?
That's the real trick. --Re-tooling your awareness so that you can continue. Some manage it very well, but there are lots (and lots) of burn-outs. Changing fields entirely is one way to re-kindle one's passion because it re-starts the process. But I think the real trick is to stay true to that which excites you without letting the accumulation of worldly experience prevent you from exploring new areas.
Eventually, though, the best way, (if you believe in such things), is to reach the natural end of your life and re-boot, so-to-speak. The veil of forgetting is pulled down tight at birth for a reason.
-FL
From the article: ... bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track. When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, "it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems."
Wow. Isn't this what Universities have been doing for hundreds of years? Its almost like academics understand this concept or something.
The point in the NYT article was much more profound that just user interfaces. I spent my entire career in engineering software battling the tendency of engineers to build ever thicker walls around their thinking boxes as their careers advanced.
Most difficult were engineers who learned clever tricks to conserving memory in their programming. As Moore's progressed, those skills devalued, then became worthless, and finally became negative in value. I had one engineer at late as 1987 who would spend two days effort to save three bytes of memory in his program. Engineers are trained to build on experience, and they expect their experiences to add to their value synergistically as the years pass. The idea that past experience could have negative value was a threat to their personal credos and their career strategy.
It got so bad in my company that I once advocated hiring programmers at age 13, taking them out of school and exploiting them until age 23. At 23 we would force them to retire and finance them to finish high school and college, then move on to some other career. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with that policy.
What should we expect? The whole profession of engineering is based on the concept of incrementally adding to and improving on past experience, from the Romans up to today. Every time a bridge collapses or some other engineering disaster occurs, the public demands that we learn lessons and never ever commit that error again. After 2,000 years of that, how much innovation can you expect?
Contrast that with what is happening at Google. According to reports, Google employees dink around with their own ideas. Sometimes they show up for work on Monday with a bit of prototype code, then they circulate it around the company looking for reactions. The winners survive and the losers disappear without any bridges collapsing or innocent people being killed. That's what so great about software -- it is so easy to prototype. To fully exploit it, you need people who don't know what they can't do.
There was a great book called Computer Wars made the same point about innovation and corporations rather than individuals. The book's point was that if and when the time comes to change the base business model and technology upon which the company was founded, that the founders feel threatened and the company fails. The battle fields re littered with the corpses of countless companies that fell victim to that trap. Now think of Google again. If and when the day comes that the Internet is no longer the big thing, will Google be flexible enough to reinvent itself or will it just die?
How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility? Probably not -- your thinking box won't allow for such possibilities.
Top-level 'human interfaces'. Groups of buttons/symbols/layouts that do ubiquitous things (play/record/cancel media, fix environmental settings/heating/aircon, setup timeswitches, make a call, extract money from the wall... what else? It does already happen in some sectors, but there's too much incentive to 'do it in a (patentable) original way' or 'do it with a minimum number of mysteriously multifunction buttons'. We want a uniform (extensible) physical 'user layer'. If there were voluntary 'Standards' which mfgrs could cite to reassure consumers that their kit would be easy to use, people might pay attention. (I won't get into onscreen PC issues, but software folk could also note). When I had things to do with this area, the dictum was - you don't have to design for disability: that's part of the definition of good design.
Creativity and knowledge go hand in hand. Expanding knowledge provides new tools to be creative. Creativity may be restricted by the properties of the outside reality, but not by knowledge. Even intelligence doesn't matter, unless something coherent needs to be created :)
My development team has a few know-nothing outsiders on every project, and it really slows things down and we end up wasting a lot of time AND doing things wrong because we have to placate someone who has no clue when they insist that the project must be re-worked to incorporate some idea they had in the 9th hour.
What you really need on projects is clear vision and leadership so you can have good decision making. Someone who has the ability to say "no", someone who can defer a good idea to a future version when it makes sense and won't derail the release date for the current version, someone who understands that less can be more, someone who is capable of putting ego aside and listening to (and heeding) good ideas when they are brought up.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The bottom line is that you can't disable your knowledge. So forcing yourself to be a beginner again isn't so easy.
The problem in remote design is that a large percentage of the buttons are unused but different ones are unused for different people/times.
If you only watch Hollywood movies all you need is play, pause etc. But if you are hard of hearing, watch foreign films or watch a lot of anime the subtitle and language buttons are critical. If you are trying to catch details, a-b and slow motion/frame by frame is very handy.
The key is to allow people to abstract the complexity and make the keys needed available when needed. Think LCARS displays.
The best solution would be a polymorphic remote like the Kameleon remotes by Universal. EL displays shift based on the mode of the remote displaying only the keys needed. Using an extension of this or a wiimote/based OSD one could implement a range of modes ranging from total noob to otaku to cinephile.
You know, its funny in that, everywhere you turn, engineers are under fire, yet, when you peel back the covers, and really look at most organizations, you will find that:
a) most teams have engineers that want to do things differently.
b) most products are the way they are for a reason.
c) the proliferation of features is driven by a need to differentiate products, and the real understanding that most people believe more is better. Every time you decide to make a DVD remote with only 20 buttons, someone's DVD remote who has 50 buttons is considered to be better. Just do this - take two gidgets, of any sort, and put them in front of a consumer, and ask which one is more expensive. 99% of the time, the one with the more buttons is the one that people will pick.
Now, as for experts, I think we've been hearing for 20 years about how all of the engineers at NASA suck and how those big fat companies like Boeing are just milking NASA for money, and how some newer and simpler startup is going to win the space race ultimately, as if, all of those Phds at NASA and Boeing just simply skated by in correspondence school. It's an easy enough myth to buy into, especially since so many vultures in Washington DC are more than happy to support that myth simply as an excuse to kill NASA.
Yet, it is a myth. Guys making paypal, doom and records are not somehow better than aerospace engineers because they are good programmers. The best we've got now is a few suborbital vehicles - big deal. NASA had that capability in the 1950s and with about the same budget (and they only had sliderules and pilots with big balls). I'm through waiting for a private Saturn V or a private Space Shuttle, because, the experiment has been done and the truth is out - flying in space is hard.
And I think you could say the same for these so-called experts. Really, when a company is bringing in these people, its really to cover up their own bad management. Do you seriously think GM engineers weren't aware that they needed to put better quality parts in their cars? I mean, really, within a few years of Bob Lutz saying "yes", and actually investing in a real product, the long moribund American Car is suddenly back. The new Cadillac CTS, is, once again, the Standard of the World.
In short, really, its not bad engineering that is the problem in America - its stupid management.
This is my sig.
Many people still accept that technology is hard, even that it has to be hard, that there's something intrinsically difficult about it.
So, if you're in front of a group of 20 people, or even 2,000 people, I'd consider these two things:
First, Powerpoint makes you stupid. You don't have to give exactly the same kind of presentation as everyone else, and even the concept of "slides" may not fit. So, yes, you do want to use your laptop, and not that remote. The laptop has more "buttons" (keys and key combinations), but you know where they are and what they do before you go in.
Alternatively, bring your own "universal remote". Have someone make a Web interface for your iPhone or something.
Second, if something goes wrong, it's not the end of the world. Depending on how good you are, it doesn't matter how bad the UI is -- if you screw something up, you can make your audience laugh with you (at you) as you try to fix it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have a keyboard with 101 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too...
I have a MacBook, with the Apple remote. How do I jump to chapter 13 of a track? I hit "forward" 12 times. Why? Because some usability guru thought simplicity was more important than functions I use daily.
Personally, I would rather have the power to perform complex task simply (and let the non-power user ignore the 48+ buttons they never use) than not have the ability to perform the tasks easily because someone took out the button.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I'm tired of hearing engineers blamed as being uncreative, uncooperative, stubborn, "need to think out of the box" people. It's a generalization based upon limited knowledge and fear of those people.
The axiom is true of every other field or profession I can think of. Do you think politicians are thinking outside the box these days? Or are they sticking with what worked in the 1920s? How about natural scientists? Einstein went to his grave refusing to believe in quantum entanglement calling it "spooky action at a distance". Marketing people? Have you seen a really different car ad in the past three decades? Accountants? Bound by limitations of math. Their numbers just have to add up and like bridges falling down if you do something shaky you get Enron type accounting.
Oh! you meant children and artists are creative. First, children. They draw on paper and come up with crazy new ideas. Well except that the things they draw can't be built due to physics of materials and usually they're crazy ideas can't be built because they aren't practical enough to be profitable or affordable. They don't have an understanding of constraints and constraints must be factored into any product. Second, artists. Come now... really look at the works of Jackson Pollock. Are his later pieces really that much more outside of his box than his first splatters of paint? I went to a gallery exhibit once and one artist painted nothing but cloud scenes over country sides and the other made nothing but abstract, headless sculptures of narrow shouldered big assed women. No artists do not think outside of their boxes any more than engineers do.
The reality is that the world, people and the universe impose constraints on any projects. As any person gets older they learn what works to keep them alive and what does not and it is very effective. It has been very effective for ten of thousands of years. Do not eat the pretty frogs no matter how hungry you are. "Out side of the box" dictates: "consider that this frog is different." NO! do NOT eat the pretty frogs... period. You are much better off thinking inside of the box.
Engineers are some of the most creative people I have ever met. They are given a goal, often with no direction of how to get there and they must reach that goal while always satisfying very tight constraints. This type of creativity is very hard. It's easy on canvas with paint but a canvas picture of an engine doesn't have to be manufacturable, it doesn't have to be profitable, it doesn't have to produce a certain minimum horsepower, it doesn't have to spin at a certain maximum revolution without seizing the bearings, it doesn't have to be made out of a certain material yet be strong enough and weigh less than a certain amount, it doesn't have to fit in a limited size cavity or connect to other components in a functional way. Yet engineered products have to have enough creativity in them to accomplish all of that and more.
Software engineering is no different. If lines of code are considered like bolts, screws and components; all of which provide some functionality. Then there are as many individual pieces in any application you use today, be it games, Word, Mozilla, than there are in a space shuttle or strokes of a brush by Monet.
The real disappointment is that the art and creativity that engineers produce is rarely recognized or appreciated. And it should be. It is so creative, in fact, that most people don't even know it's there or could understand it even if it was explained to them.
Engineers have their own wu and it is very, very strong.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Many VCRs, at least the ones sold today, will come with remotes with tiny buttons with tiny text, each one different, and many tapes will not play unless you press the "play" button.
The only significant difference with 99% of DVDs is, you have to wait for the menu to come up, then you press "select" or "ok". This is not difficult -- it's a big round button in between all the arrow buttons.
Why are you teaching your elderly parents to do more than just play the movie? And if you are, why are you so disappointed that DVD players are more difficult to use -- considering that they let you do more? That's a necessary part of letting you do more, by the way.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you like this stuff then you'll like this academic article:
March, J. G. 1991, 'Exploration, and exploitation of organizational learning', Organization Science 2(1), 71-87.
As I understand it March argues that new participants are required to learn new ways of doing things (just as the FTA does). March goes further though and argues that some kinds of organizations (often unconsciously) force 'rapid socialization' on new participants, bringing them in line with the groupthink quickly. He argues for a balanced socialization period, in which the organization can actually learn from the novel perspective (although not so long that the organization doesn't get back to exploiting its knowledge).
There's lots of good literature citing this article too.
No, wait, I'm not - let's all play backetball left handed, and for money.
Any movie playing device that does not just start playing the movie when it is inserted is broken from design. Yes that includes DVD players. It makes absolutely no sense to bring up a feature (the menu) that will be needed .01% of the time, instead of the feature that will be used 99.99% of the time. This is particularly a poor design choice when the process of going from the 99.99% used feature to the .01% feature is the same as the other way around. The design of the DVD belongs in a UI hall of shame.
I'm against stupid laws, but as long as some asshat is going to churn out a new one every five minutes, we need a couple of good ones:
1) Any DVD with multiple episodes on one disk should default to PLAY ALL, so when you can't find the damn remote, you can at least watch more than the first episode.
2) Any sound that plays after a DVD ends, should, by law, only be allowed to play for five minutes or less, and then it should go silent.
With just these two laws, people might want to start visiting the US again.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Because invariably, they've chosen a poor switch/button on the device (or tried for a minimalist face* and omitted it entirely) that's not in a convenient location, or doesn't have much travel so combined with the delay you're not ever quite sure you've really pressed it.
*which is silly on the face of it (grin). Offloading complication onto the remote just clutters up the remote, and has other downsides as well. I have a VCR that can't access the menu system except through the remote. (made by sony. One of many visually appealing disappointments from that company.) Which is especially unfortunate as I have somehow damaged the menu button on the remote, and a replacement remote costs more than the entire VCR at this point so I have to use a freakin' screwdriver to close the contacts every time I want to program it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
For years I've seen this exact scenario repeat itself. The supposed "professional" becoming so fixated on doing something one way that he no longer sees the potential of the tools beyond his own everyday use of them. While at the same time, the seemingly "ignorant" guy manages to upstage the professional simply because they don't yet know the "limitations" of the tools.
The problem is how does one prevent themselves from becoming too complacent with the tools after they're convinced that their own methods are the best way to do something, simply because they work reliably every time?
Even stuff that seems like it should only have one definitive answer, such as math, can often have more than just the obvious answer. For example... resolve for Y:
Y * Y = 25
Most people would say Y can only equal 5.
Most people would also be wrong.
Y can also be -5 and yield the same result.
It's all a matter of how you look at it... and whatever episode of the Simpsons you plagerize to make a point. (Yeah... I went there.)
8==8 Bones 8==8
I can't tell you how many presentations I've sat through by otherwise intelligent software vendors who couldn't get their electronic presentations to work (batteries in their laptop quit, couldn't get through their firewall, couldn't get through our firewall, system incompatabilities, etc.) Usually they get the presentation up and running eventually, but it doesn't get them off to a good start with the customer. You should always bring something for your audience to stare at other than the back of your head while you are fiddling with your equipment and mumbling about how it was working just fine back at the home office.
Without lots of buttons, you often need "modes" and deep menus, and modes are hardly a UI design dream either. I'm not sure what the ideal TV remote control UI would be. It would be interesting to have a design contest. Maybe a Wii-like control that allows one to mouse-around in TV menus? However, that's expensive (at least now). Before one complains about lots of buttons, let's see the alternative.
Table-ized A.I.
Was assuming that the remote control was actually "designed" and not just "thrown together at the end of the day by someone who figured out the circuit board for it and happens to know how to use the layout tool the company owns."
What bothers me is the way everyone here takes the article so literally and so narrowly. They use a remote as an example, but it doesn't just apply to user interfaces. For example code re-use which is generally a good thing, as far a productivity goes, but is actually a double edged sword.
:)
Frameworks a good example of what I mean. While a framework helps us to get things done, most will no longer think of their own solution to the problem, relying on someone else's solution. This mean a new novel solution to the same problem (that may be useful in other ways) is never found because we all use the same solution. In business, using a framework is often imperative since time is money (and it uses the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' principle). However, we need to remember sometimes about the trade off. Not writing new code for a similar problem means that there is absolutely no chance of discovering something new.
Now... think about where this applies in other situations... including outside of programming.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
.... getting a focus and keeping it on core knowledge.
Core knowledge is that when is honest and open and can be considered the foundation or core of all other knowledge that can be extracted and/or extrapolated from it.
Such example are the primary colors of light and paint. With them you can create all the colors of the rainbow, but as soon as you lose touch with these and put some colors that are not primary as the starting point of creation, you will discover increasing limitations in what you can color.
The computer industry has long lost touch with the core knowledge of computing and as such has lost the ability to innovate as well as it could,
Such sore knowledge may not seem very exciting or important anymore than how exciting we find the primary colors to be as themselves, but it is what they enable the building of that is of importance.
Computers, from their fundamental transistor switching to the high level of abstraction we use to program them today, does contain core knowledge, inherently, but its human focus and recognition and intentional use of the core knowledge that enables innovation.
Abstraction Physics presents such core knowledge and system user interface needs.
On your next interview, claim that you will benefit the company since you are a "Zero Gravity Thinker".
I've been involved in this process a couple of times. Engineers participated, but the UI people and ultimately the product manager made the final call. It's not even necessarily about making the device function well for the consumer; some buttons exist for the purpose of demonstrating to a potential buyer that the device has a particular feature.
-Dave
Cheap rocks. No matter how cheap the device, it always comes equipped with the handy "landfill" option once you discover, for example, that lack of a humidity control or the ability to regulate the ice box temperature independently from the main compartment is costing you more than the simplicity is worth.
Nothing beats having the simplest and cheapest that exactly suits your needs. It'll take you, on average, three to five purchase cycles to achieve this. And when your golden cheapee finally bites it, you'll have to start your search all over again as everything you learned from the initial purchase cycle has been replaced by cheaper or bellier or an incompatible standard. For example, my road bike has a seven speed hub. No matter how perfect the frame or how comfortable I feel, it likely won't outlive the current rings and chain.
OTOH, if you go top of the line, it will still take you an average of 2 or 3 purchase iterations before you find exactly what you wanted. Unless you're the type of person who can easily convince yourself that an outrageous annoyance (one button mouse) constitutes a feature. Apple has achieved a monopoly among the well-heeled who fit this psychological profile, which is why they are the one company that succeeds in doing simple right (even when they don't, which is their crucial advantage).
The problem with DVD player design is that the player is too tightly coupled to its remote. I believe the anti-landfill lobby should convince the government regulators to mandate that all such devices have a facility to export their IR interface definition to any remote the user desires. Intelligent appliances are also becoming a target of the overburdened electrical grid. The manufacturers can no longer claim that adding a 100K of metadata or a few kilobytes of macro memory (so that a universal remote can achieve complex functions quickly) adds anything much to the cost that a reduced landfill rate wouldn't recover ten times over.
I remember the golden era when the interface to the local landfill was dead simple: drop (the tailgate) and fling. Those monuments to simplicity are with us still.
As someone who read the book Made to Stick maybe a little clarification of the contex of the 52 buttons is in order. The curse of knowledge simply put is that when we know something, we find it hard to imagine what was like not to know it. Our knowledge has cursed us. And it becomes difficult for us to share knowledge with others, thus the situation occurs where we either give too much information (the 52 buttons) or too little (a windows vista error message.. just kidding...sort of). So bringing in a non-expert can address the principles that the brothers describe in the book, the first being simplicity to quote - "a designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away". As designer's we should know that a million buttons does not mean innovation and sometimes it takes a n00b to show us the way.
End of line
As the basketball article mentioned, the easiest way to teach something is to re-learn it yourself. I've personally written tutorials for people on various libraries that I was myself learning the week before. I commented the heck out of the code I was writing at the time so I'd know what it meant next time I looked at it (for reference), and thought "If I added some exposition here, it'd be a great tutorial for other people".
:)
I only have that unfiltered view of a new system that once, so now whenever I'm learning something that someone else is going to want to know, I take copious notes so I can write it up later. Usually the stumbling blocks that I hit are the ones that other new people to the topic will hit. The only downside is that I might do something wrong in the tutorial due to lack of knowledge on the topic, but once I release it I get corrected pretty quickly
-Denor
Nearly a decade ago Sony released a receiver (starting with the STR-DA90ESG) which utilized a Wii-like control you used to mouse-around the GUI/menus; here's a pic of the remote http://www.dvdremotecontrols.com/Mfrs/Sony/SonyAudio/RM-VP1.jpg/.
Some people loved it, but most people (especially reviewers) *hated* this "Vision Touch" approach to the user interface. It was so long ago that commercial reviews aren't available online, but there are references to those criticisms in the owner reviews posted at http://www.audioreview.com/mfr/sony/a-v-receivers/PRD_118802_2718crx.aspx/.
After just a few years of that they wised up and switched to the better approach of shipping two remotes -- one with all the buttons that you put away and only dig out when you're doing something complicated and one with only the most-used buttons for daily use. "But my DVD player only came with one super-sized remote" you say? Not exactly -- the one that came in your DVD player's box is supposed to be the uber-remote that you put away for infrequent use and the one that came in your TV's box (the play, pause, rew/ff, menu, power buttons) is the one for your daily use.
"bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track."
So I found a job last December after months of applying into two different cities. The job involved working with a 3D software suite written in C++ (Microsoft Visual C++ 2003, OpenSceneGraph based).
I had no previous 3D/OpenGL experience though my C++ was sound since I had learned it on my own from a Que book and completed a 2nd year course at a local University with an 'A' final grade.
As an example of this solution holding water, I was asked to fix the orbit code which used the cross product to calculate the orbit of the camera position relative to the first object found in a projection in the direction of the camera's viewing angle. The problem was that the programmer who coded it did not seem to be aware of the exceptions with the cross product and since I am not a 3D geometry wizard I decided to tackle the problem differently.
Instead of calculating the arc with the cross product I decided to take an approach where I inverted the camera's Quaternion, rotated it along the orbital plain accordingly and projected a vector from the orbit point to the camera's new location. I then rotated the camera's Quaternion in the inverse direction on the plain to the orbit point's Quaternion. So instead of plotting the course along the outside of the circle I plotted the course through the center of the circle.
Other things I did included adding mutexes to threads which were not being used properly. If you clicked on the move forward HUD button twice quickly the camera would jump from one position to another. No one in the small company had a clue what was causing this, but I quickly identified it as two threads running at the same time since the original programmer had launched a new thread every time one pressed a HUD button.
I suggested that we should go into a maintenance cycle before we attempted to proceed with development to address these and other design issues. The original programmer had no concept of the Model, View, Controller design paradigm and continuing to program a 3D visualization suite in a RAD manner was flaky at best.
The director, still wholly unaware (or uncaring) of my technical contributions including what I've mentioned so far stated that it would not be "pragmatic" to change the plan to enter maintenance now. From a technical perspective I disagreed with that call, trying to warn them of the long term development impacts of coupled modules when our plan specifically called from a suite of products to be developed, as well as the increasing complexity of not properly encapsulating data (most data members were public and being altered from several classes).
I dropped the issue at the request of the president who put his trust in the director. Some time later I was terminated and the official reason given to me was that the president felt it would be better for the company.
I guess I was causing friction by raising technical points in a technical field.
You see, the director didn't know what he was talking about, not being a true-blue C++ programmer (for example he did not know what a C++ reference was, thinking Classname& fieldname was a programming error) and ruled against me because he did not trust my judgement calls.
So hiring unexperienced people may lead to a more complete development process however it will cause inter-personal friction because seniority can be misused and abused frequently when a competant enters at the bottom of the ladder.
By the way, I have not found another job since April despite applying to an average of 1 IT related job (including tech support, just about anything) every 2 days between April and November.
I'm being told to go take that McDonalds job now 'cause no one wants to hire me and social assistance is the one insisting on it. Problem with that is that I worked those jobs from 1994-2000 and I'm not accepting that my career is coming to an end not because I'm not competant, but
maybe some developer jobs will open up that do not require 5 years of experience in every tech the job might us.
It is the MARKETING and MANAGEMENT teams that take a simple device and make it uselessly complex. You see those pointy-haired goons can't stomach the idea of losing even one sale because their easy-to-use and appropriate device looks less capable than the one with the zillion buttons.
:-(
Doesn't always happen though; I helped design NT's "Delegate" Digital Announcer back in the late 80s and it had ONE button on it, and I designed that one button to never, ever fail. It was just a paddle -backed button captured in the front panel with tines and a spring. When you pushed the button, it interrupted a light beam (we used one of those cheap LED/CdS devices commonly used to count shaft rotations) and turned the device on or off.
The rest of the functionality was all audio menus and very simple.
Of course, as soon as we had pallets of the things in hand, NT decided that they didn't know how to market a consumer product and ordered them all destroyed, which was done by driving a skiploader over them all and then sending them off to a landfill.
And that is why you do not see simple and appropriate products anywhere...
Dog is my co-pilot.
An issue that is completely ignored in the discussion of the 50-button remote control is the fact that a lot of those buttons are really an answer to the horrible complexities of modern technology. I own a DVR (a pioneer) it supports something like 15 different (video) file formats (not counting the numerous varieties of these formats) the manual is full of exceptions and warning of things that work (or not) for a particular file format. the question from an ignorant consumer would no doubt be why we need so many file formats just to play some video at home. next is the programming functionality,which comes with an huge numberer of options. included is an electronic programming guide, which looks very nice and actually works, apart from the fact that the guide only knows about the published program times,not the actual times,This makes the thing completely useless. then there is the fact that the machine supports about 10 different recording media, all possible varieties of CD-R and DVD-R. Same story of warnings and exceptions. then there is support for a number of picture aspect ratios, which may,or may not be automatically recognized based on the transmitted signal. And then there is a complex guide about how to copy a file from one medium to another. Same warnings and exceptions. And copy protection. And you think it will just recognize a DVD formatted on a PC? No of course it will not. So what is the conclusion? What we see is a lot of useful things implemented by the engineers that designed this particular PVR. The problem is that many of the features that they try to get working depend on other infrastructure being there, like a reliable electronic program guide that also works as aprogram is late, like a simple video file format standard, good standardized media etc. And the simple fact is that these things are not there. And as long as these standards are not set and widely implemented, the mess will stay, and people will get confused. Compare for a moment with the situation round the time that electricity was new, and voltages, connectors and system (AC/DC) changed from one city block to the next. i bet people were confused then,like we are now with allthis new technology that surrounds us. And the it makes no sense to perster the engineers with this problem because setting standards is most of the time more of a political than a technical process.
"as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off because the walls of the box we think inside of thicken along with our experience."
There is already a fix for this. It's called death.
one with all the buttons that you put away and only dig out when you're doing something complicated and one with only the most-used buttons for daily use.
Two--That's a good idea. And, still have an on-screen menu that one can use the simple control with to get at features in case the button-heavy one is lost. I can dig it!
Table-ized A.I.
Sign me up. I want a job like that.
When travelling, it's ok if the airlines lose your emotional baggage.
Are you suggesting I think about building my own hooker instead of just re-using the same one? Or perhaps I should at least go to a different brothel and try others? Perhaps, by I am kind of happy with the current solution to the problem.
Still, I see you're point. Now if somebody would actually admit that just because Struts is free and supposedly "standard" doesn't mean we should continue to build new apps with it, I'd be a little more pleasant this morning. "If it is free, then it ain't broke" seems to be the thinking around here.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
"Look and feel" lawsuits bog down innovation. Patents bog down innovation. Knowledge doesn't.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There's one example of user interface elegance that has stuck with me for decades, and I use it to remind myself of what's possible, and avoiding making things more complicated than necessary:
I've had telephone answering machines before; they typically had many buttons on them (rewind, stop, play, fast forward, erase, record) and tapes for incoming and outgoing, etc.. Quite complex, for the simple task of playing and recording a message.
But I bought one, which wasn't terribly inexpensive, that was clean and elegant looking, with *one* big visible button on the outside and one LED. On the side was a volume knob. And the amazing thing is that it was as functional as my prior more complicated machines.
When there was a message, the link blinked. Intuitive. You'd press the big button to hear the messages. Simple. To back up while playing a message, you simply held the big button down (not completely intuitive, but easy to learn/figure out or read in the manual). After playing the messages, the LED would blink quickly for a few seconds; you could then tap the big button to keep your messages, or do nothing to have it turf the messages. (Again, not necessarily intuitive, but trivial to learn/understand and use.) You could also record memos of your own by pressing and holding the button at any time. A lot of functionality built into one button, and not hard to use at all. Very clever.
You could stop it from answering by turning the volume knob all the way down until it clicks; fairly intuitive.
It had one microcassette; the answering message was recorded at the start, and it would record messages after that (fast forwarding as necessary for additional messages before recording). This microcassette was under an opague door on the top of the unit. Opening the door also revealed another smaller button. The single button inside paralleled the use of the outside button to a large degree, but for handling your answering message. Press and hold it to record your message (similar to the memo record of the outside big button). Tap it once to play/check your answering message, pressing/holding it to rewind during the message. Very elegant, yet quite functional.
The thing was a masterpiece of simplicity, elegance, understatement, functionality, and design.
Yes, answering machines are ancient technology now, but the thought that went into that "user interface" design continues to inspire me when I create web interfaces.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
a use for my Alzheimers
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Knowledge does not in any way limit innovation. If you have the knowledge to solve a problem then you don't need to innovate. The real problem is that innovation is destructive and replaces something that someone has an interest in, and there is a resistance to it. When computers were shown to be able to do creative work as in computer graphics, it was the computer people who backed it because it was seen as a way of selling computers. Very few artists backed it because it threatened them. I know because in the 1960s I ran conferences on it, and they were full of computer salesmen who couldn't tell a work of art from a roll of toilet paper, but they could see the applications. On the other hand those working in the arts (with a few exceptions)made arguments against computers. Another aspect that has been studied is how 'success' leads to failure. Someone gets a good idea and forms a company. They then employ and administrator to run the company. The company grows. The admin department grows, but employs other admin people who know about running companies but not about the customers needs. At some point the admin people see their job as being essential but the customers needs as secondary. The companies income goes towards the admin needs, and the company loses its innovative skills. This leaves the market open to a new innovator, and the sequence starts again. A third aspect is that innovators invent because they like inventing. Most of them do not have a need for their own inventions. In fact, once they have an idea the biggest problem is convincing others that the idea is needed at all. Anyone who has seen TV programmes on budding entrepreneurs will know what stupid ideas are presented for funding. Also anyone working in advertising knows that selling totally useless things is an industry and well established in the fashion, medical, and eletrical gizmo worlds. A visit to your local charity show will show how many people spend their lives designing/producing/selling/ articles that serve no purpose other than filling cupboards and drawers. Useless Christmas presents are a tradition (is there a recorded instance of anyone getting a really useful present at this time?). True innovators who see a 'real' need (not a percieved one) are few and far between. And the need they see is usually obvious and not actually noticed by others. If your children watch too much TV there will be some brilliant person who will make a TV that checks on the children and regulates their watching time. A not so brilliant person will simply give the children something more interesting to do that watching TV. An innovation that suffers from the perception that not watching TV is a deprivation.
Chances are most of those buttons are there because some Marketing/Sales wonk decided it had to be there, not some engineer. Chances are, the engineers had some other way to do it, but everyone thought it was too "complicated for normal people... give them a button to do it instead".
I'm quite certain that is how "email" and "web" buttons appeared on keyboards... some marketer said "I want the box to say this is an INTERNET keyboard!"
An article in the NY Times proposes a solution to the curse: bring outsiders with no experience onto teams to keep creativity and innovation on track.
Great, they've managed to re-invent the Pointy Headed Boss, along with his favorite justification for existence.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
This weekend I used a DVD player at my brother's house (a fairly inexpensive unit). The remote had no PLAY, PAUSE, or STOP button. You could access those functions, but only using "rethought" controls. It was absolutely maddening.
I've developed lots of products, and any shortcomings the products had were the result of a lack of knowledge, not a surplus of it.
Either we failed to think through a certain use case, or there was a different demographic than we expected, or (most commonly) we failed to push a reviewer's hot buttons through lack of some feature or another.
Neophytes will tell you they want it simple, but they don't know how to design a product that will do what they want. That's why they're neophytes and not product designers.
I find these type of 'we need people who don't know what's impossible' comments to be a form of anti-intellectualism.
But if a consumer finds a product to be particularly usable, I'll warrant he's a lot more likely to buy the product, or something from that company, the second time.
All those electronics are produced at very low cost nowadays, what we are talking here is about service and companies willing to please their costumers (what a thought).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Some geeks (engineers, programmers, whatever), no matter how brilliant, seem to think that sliced bread was invented yesterday.
People have always adapted, and very often do so against their will and in disadvantageous situations.
To idly ask "could you reinvent yourself?" is lazy thinking, since the answer is yes, so what is the point asking?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is not that they are specializing necessarily.
If you are going to do something properly you try it. Many times.
This is true for Leonardo, Monet or Picasso. Picasso went literally bananas painting things like horses, minotaurs adn many other animals. All this coalesced in the Guernica (for which he made countless of drafts).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... because your question is leading.
If you would ask for the value of Y for:
Y=sqrt(25)
you would probably get more correct answers .
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
DRM helped me quit buying porn. I was one of those early adopters who bought the fancy $500+ DVD player w/ a-b, a-b-a, frame by frame, etc. and a stack of porn vids. I soon found out they can use the same control disabling they use to make you watch the interpol statement to prevent one from using the advanced functions or sometimes even rewind/FF. I haven't bought a DVD since.
You are so right,sometime I get lost up here. The toys that they make for us,will just might ground my spaceship.