One of the beautiful things about having your own blog is the ability to talk about whatever you want. During the run-up to the IBA’09, I was nominated in the ‘tech’ category which automatically put me up against some of the biggest heavyweights in the Irish tech community. And my argument was, and still is, I’m not really a tech blogger. I write about what interests me – what makes me tick and sometimes what makes me tock.
My current interest is user interface design, especially focussed on small devices. That means I’ll be talking and ranting a bit about that.
Now – I’m not a designer other than I know what I like, I have reasons for it, I’ve read a good bit about user interfaces and I studied HCI in University (the standard single module squeezed in between Knowledge Based Systems and Information Systems Analysis and Design. I’m not an artist (though I have drawn ‘life’ incredibly accurately – in my dissection classes – which means I can effectively draw anything that I’ve killed or dismembered. So, I’m not an artist.
But Design is something you can learn. There’s a quality of art about it but most of it is science. I’m constantly reminded that in every object that is manufactured, in every piece of software that is build, the size, shape, the curve of things, the straight lines, the position of inputs and outputs, every pixel of a user interface – all of it was designed. It may have been designed well or it may have been designed badly, but it was designed.
So, I’m going to be ranting a bit about user interface design. Not web design. Not web standards. User interface design – focussing on small screens.
I worked for a engineering company here in Belfast producing some excellent medical devices, groundbreaking stuff.
Trouble was, they were all engineers.
When I first got hold of a device (I was doing a combination of firmware and software for them) it was 2 devices. These 2 devices needed pairing. I asked “How do you pair them?”
The answer, “you have to press the record button on one device, and the power button on the other device, after 5 seconds one will beep and the other will flash and then vice-versa”
My response, “You expect doctors to remember this and know what is going on?”
One of the devices even had something to do with ecg, but no display, so you couldn’t tell if the device was reading ecg when you put it on a patient. The engineers didn’t really know how to overcome this – so I suggested making the unit beep when it detected a heart beat – so there was a minimal feedback.
A prime example of having great tech, and great ideas, but not designing from day 1.
On a side note I recently used a dx7400 epson all-in-one printer. I was astounded, as it doesn’t have a screen, but when you pop in a memory card, you push a button and it prints out a machine readable form – you colour in a few circles, pop it back in the scanner, press another button – and hey presto, all the photos you “ordered” print out. That is ingenious thinking, and for a totally cheap printer not at all what I expected.
The devices I’ve seen tend to be well designed but they’re so obviously medical devices that they can’t ever be part of someone’s lifestyle.
Better to design something unobtrusive – that links into existing tech – everyone carries a small computer around these days, even if it’s not a smartphone.
The dx7400 looks like a novel approach – removing the screen makes it cheaper and printing out the proofs uses more ink! Fair play!
It the classic problem of someone being so close to the product, and knowing the ins and outs that they can’t see why there is anything wrong with the interface.
And then the first time it hits a customer (or someone not closely involved with the creation) and they can’t figure out why it’s not obvious that you need to press three buttons at the same time.
As for the printer/scanner, well those ink cartridges are the real money maker.
Its hard to fight.
Hi Wil,
This is endemic in Open Source software more than anything. Of course, if you wrote the software, then you’ll know why you placed something somewhere.
See here:
“Mozilla, the most user-experience-focused of open-source companies, has the most adoption by end-users.
People say things to me like, “Linux is only free if the value of my time is zero.â€
These are not coincidences.”
Things are improving (slowly) as more non-technical and more creative people get involved.
The ubuntu studio will end up causing HCI improvements as a side-effect. The studio is designed for sound recording (where a missed millisecond in a 5 hour recording session = a failed 5 hours), video editing (similar thing) and 3d rendering. All are very technical, but its the artistic end of the technical spectrum (arguably the end with less technical and non-programming users)
Or to put it another way, an apple rival.
Sometimes, HCI improvements happens because it has to.