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| Failure by design |
July 10, 2008 |
Some products are huge, others huge disasters. Often the dividing line is drawn right through the design specs
 By Ian Harvey
Murphy was right. What can go wrong usually does.
No matter how cool looking or entertaining something is, if we can’t use it — or if using it is too complex — we give up in frustration. It happens with Web sites, consumer electronics, software and more.
The reverse is also true: great design can rescue a mediocre product. Take the iPhone. It lacks many of the features and functions of other smart phones but grabbed headlines because it is so easy to use. Compared to Windows Mobile 5, which had been on the market for three years before the iPhone, it was a breath of fresh air.
“I was so frustrated with my Windows Mobile phone because the synchronization program, ActiveSync, just didn’t work, it was horrible,” said Steve Krug, a usability guru and author of Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (New Riders, 2000). The book is considered a seminal tome on the subject. “Last December I played with my neighbour’s iPhone. I decided if my Windows phone was making me so unhappy, I would just get rid of it.”
While the iPhone can’t compete feature to feature with a Windows phone, he said it’s closer to the experience he had with his old Palm Pilot. “You connect it, push a button and it syncs. The connection is slower than the EDVO network I was using (on my Windows phone) but the Web browser responds so quickly and they’ve done such a good job with the screen, it doesn’t matter.”
He’s not alone in his opinion.
“I think that in a lot of products — and obviously in the software and computer technology fields as well — there’s a disconnect between the engineer, the technologists and the designer,” said Sir James Dyson, famous for reinventing the humble vacuum cleaner in form and function. “Usability can drive technology forward, and vice versa.”
The usability gap also irritates Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft and associate professor in computer science at the University of Toronto, who also did a stint at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His frustrations boiled over into a book, Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007), which has the unique distinction of being endorsed by his boss, Bill Gates, and Genesis founder and legendary rocker Peter Gabriel, an aficionado of design and a pal who collaborated with Buxton on some early synthesizer projects.
“The question is, where’s the user interface?” asked Buxton, brushing back the silver grey strands of his long hair in his east-end Toronto kitchen. “Is it in the hardware or software? Traditional industrial designers understand the hardware but not the software. Computer scientists understand the software but they have no experience with design. We need a new kind of designer — an interaction or experience designer — who understands both the technology and the context.”
Dyson agreed: “People like Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) didn’t see the difference between the designer, the scientist and the engineer; they were one,” said Dyson during a stop in Toronto last winter.
The irony of Buxton’s position is palpable, since Microsoft is often cited as the progenitor of bad design and Apple as the font of great design. Buxton is unapologetic, however, noting, “I didn’t go to work for Apple because they don’t need me.”
Needed: VP, design
The fastest way to ensure good user design is to place that responsibility with top executives, Buxton said. “If your company has a chief financial officer, a chief technology officer or chief information officer, a vice-president of human resources and of marketing, you’d better also have a chief design officer or vice-president of design, otherwise you’re not serious about design.”
Apple has that in the form of Jonathan Ive, senior vice-president of industrial design, reporting directly to CEO Steve Jobs. But such lofty status for designers is rare in companies, though Dyson, as founder and CEO of his company, is an obvious exception. He’s no one-hit wonder, having had a couple of impressive successes long before he took on the lowly vacuum cleaner. The first was a flat-bottomed fiberglass marine vessel called the Sea Truck, which could carry a Land Rover across water and drop it on the beach. The second was the Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow with a ball-shaped wheel to better carry loads across muddy terrain. He again reinvented the wheel for his new updated line of vacuums by creating a unique ball that also acts as the housing for the motor. As Dyson said, introducing a design change is a point of pain within most companies, even in his own. There were concerns new models would cannibalize sales of older models or, worse, not sell at all.
“But you have to take that risk,” said Dyson, who now invests much of his time championing design and sponsoring competitions for students around the world. A Toronto-area team won second place for its design of a bicycle handbrake system for a one-armed rider.
“Even though it is a leap into the unknown, you have to take the risk. People don’t like doing that in a bigger company and so they get stuck. Ironically, global marketing has only made that worse because the stakes are higher and it drives more conservatism in the marketplace,” said Dyson, who is also setting up a design college in his native England.
Usability, usability, usability
Design starts with looking at how people use products. Mobile phone giant Nokia, which captures half of all phone sales in Europe and Asia, uses anthropologists with degrees in design to elicit ideas from users. It has teams combing the world, looking at how people actually use their mobiles, from third-world prostitutes to farmers in the field. The results are surprising and could lead to design changes such as icons instead of text and pictures instead of names for illiterate users.
It’s cutting-edge design because it’s design from the bottom up, not the top down. In the meantime, Krug’s not holding his breath for a revolution in the boardroom, but he is more hopeful the new generation of designers is getting it.
“I think there are going to be more usability courses in design schools,” he said. “And I think the engineers and designers are starting to understand that it matters because they want people to use their products.”
Putting up with bad design
Sometimes we tolerate bad design because we have no other choice.
The layout of the QWERTY keyboard, for example, was designed specifically to put the most frequently used keys far apart to slow the operator down, because early manual typewriters would jam if worked too quickly. The more ergonomic Dvorak keyboard, introduced in 1936, never overcame the critical mass of the QWERTY, so we’re stuck with bad design.
But this isn’t uncommon: why, for example, is the gas cap on cars not consistently on one side? Why don’t fax machines all make it clear which way the paper goes in? Why do some cordless phones have their on-off button placed so picking it up or pressing it to your ear turns it off? Why do mobile phones have so many features but no simple way to explain how they work? (For more see www.baddesigns.com for an ongoing collection of missteps).
Good design, on the other hand, just works.
Buxton points to his wife’s Canon D-SLR and to Microsoft’s new Zune players, which he said “got it right.”
The hallmark of such design, said Dyson, is you don’t need an instruction manual to get started. “It’s semiotic design (the science of interpreting signs): the thing itself should tell what it does for you. That’s what we’re trying to do with our product. You don’t need instructions because it’s obvious. People don’t have to think about it.”
He is also a fan of Apple’s iPod and iPhone, though he said Apple’s look, as created by Jonathan Ive, owes a lot to Dieter Rams, the German industrial designer famous for his work with Braun in the 1960s though the 1990s. He’s not so kind about Microsoft’s Windows operating system, however, noting his disdain for anything “which pulls you out of your comfort zone and makes you learn its vernacular. Appalling design.”
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