Consumers want ease-of-use, not features

January 1, 2009

Drew Winter over at Ward’s Auto World has a great editorial about a new “breakthrough”. That breakthrough is the realization that people don’t care about all kinds of whizzy features as much as they do about user friendliness. He attended the same SAE Convergence conference that I did in October 2008, and saw all the presentations about human interface design. This was where I told you about Honda’s work showing that people loved heads up displays. Drew gives the classic example of the BMW iDrive, the geek-fest monstrosity that had 700 menu picks and took 7 of them just to change a radio station. Consumer Reports says it takes 9 steps to change the clock. Drew notes the BMW has gotten with the program and added a few buttons to the base of the joystick. In other words, they got a little analog, and realized there is a sense of importance to control interfaces. That is why the steering wheel is a big round thing right in your face and the Bass Boost is a tiny insignificant button on the console. Artsy types and Japanese consumer electronics designers have this Church-lady tidiness that makes them have all the buttons be the same size and all in tidy little rows. Total moron geeks then replace all the buttons with one big one, but rather than use Morse Code or some standard, they have to dream up some new goofy single-point-interface tapping code, or perhaps I should call it a puzzle.

The new BMW iDrive for 2009, note the dedicated buttons and descriptive labels.

The old BMW iDrive, designed by the same idiots that put one knob on HP oscilloscopes back in the 1980s.

Note how the new design actually used real English words printed in bold san-serif letters to convey information. That is another pet peeve of mine, the love of icons. This is not all the automakers fault. When I was a design engineer at Ford Motor back in the 1980s, Ford begged the government to let them put plain English labels under the heater control icons. Ford argued that words are icons too, and that words are far more understandable than some graphical icon. Our dear beloved government would not let Ford use words for the controls, because the Untied States Government has so much contempt for you they think you will be confused if there is a word and an icon in the same button. Just go to your cube, sit at your desk and eat the food pellet that falls when you have typed enough. Our finance industry needs the loot.

Posted by Paul Rako on January 1, 2009 | Comments (8)

January 6, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
colin dore commented:

Some engineers recognise the need for simplicity. I am working with some guys who are developing a 'programmable display'button which could have any icon or word on it. This would be ideal for international customisation or personal preference settings.

January 6, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
CB commented:

You do not have to find the dumbest technophobe in marketing within the company but start to teach the engineers and designers to listen to customers. Yes everyone needs simple things but most of all intuitive. Then a very good engineer will make this happening .

January 6, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
Battar commented:

I've had it up to here trying to explain to engineers that they are not designing equipment for their own use. My advice is, design an interface, then find the dumbest technophobe in the company (You will usually locate him in Marketing) and ask if he can figure it out for himself. If he can't, you've got the design wrong.

January 5, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
Frustrated user commented:

Speaking of idiots, I love that the manufacturer of my cell phone at least included an ICON gallery three levels deep in the menu. Because of that I can spend only a few minuts in the menu, rather than looking for the book, or looking on line to figure out that my phone is trying to tell me that I had a missed call! Count me in the camp of wants ease of use. I already have so many features that I can't stand more

January 5, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
Hjalmar commented:

Almost as bad as those dopey letters at the bottom of the page that look like they were handwritten by someone in an alcoholic stupor to prove you are not an mechanical device posting a comment.

January 5, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
JOHN CHAMBLESS commented:

ALL COMPUTERS SHOULD BE ELIMINATED FROM CARS AND GO BACK TO KNOBS AND SWITCHES WITH ENGLISH LABELS. SAME FOR CELL PHONES, WHY CAN''T I GET A CELL PHONE THAT LETS ME LISTEN WNEN IT RINGS AND LETS ME PUNCH IN A NUMBER WHEN I WANT TO CALL SOMEONE, I DON/T WANT TEXT MESSAGES AND I DON''T NEED A BUILT IN CAMERA

January 3, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
Steve Williams commented:

Somehow all this reminds me of old European consumer electronics (and cars for that matter) that left you pondering what the switch with a red dot on one side and a blue and a yellow dot on the other side did...

January 2, 2009

In response to: Consumers want ease-of-use, not features
Alex Hiley commented:

Speaking as a designer, use icons if you're selling internationally. Speaking as a user, very few icons are self-explanatory and I'd much rather see words. Perhaps eventually we'll have little flexible displays on every button. Once you've set the language on the main display then all the buttons would display words in the correct language. On the other hand the electrical connections to all those buttons would be a bit of a nightmare and just extra stuff to go wrong.

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