The Design of Everyday Things (23 page)

I decided to ask the audience. I showed them the controller and asked: “To get to my next picture, which button should I push, the top or the bottom?” To my great surprise, the audience was split in their responses. Many thought that it should be the top button, just as I had thought. But a large number thought it should be the bottom.

What's the correct answer? I decided to ask this question to my audiences around the world. I discovered that they, too, were split in their opinions: some people firmly believe that it is the top button and some, just as firmly, believe it is the bottom button. Everyone is surprised to learn that someone else might think differently.

I was puzzled until I realized that this was a point-of-view problem, very similar to the way different cultures view time. In some
cultures, time is represented mentally as if it were a road stretching out ahead of the person. As a person moves through time, the person moves forward along the time line. Other cultures use the same representation, except now it is the person who is fixed and it is time that moves: an event in the future moves toward the person.

This is precisely what was happening with the controller. Yes, the top button does cause something to move forward, but the question is, what is moving? Some people thought that the person would move through the images, other people thought the images would move. People who thought that they moved through the images wanted the top button to indicate the next one. People who thought it was the illustrations that moved would get to the next image by pushing the bottom button, causing the images to move toward them.

Some cultures represent the time line vertically: up for the future, down for the past. Other cultures have rather different views. For example, does the future lie ahead or behind? To most of us, the question makes no sense: of course, the future lies ahead—the past is behind us. We speak this way, discussing the “arrival” of the future; we are pleased that many unfortunate events of the past have been “left behind.”

But why couldn't the past be in front of us and the future behind? Does that sound strange? Why? We can see what is in front of us, but not what is behind, just as we can remember what happened in the past, but we can't remember the future. Not only that, but we can remember recent events much more clearly than long-past events, captured neatly by the visual metaphor in which the past lines up before us, the most recent events being the closest so that they are clearly perceived (remembered), with long-past events far in the distance, remembered and perceived with difficulty. Still sound weird? This is how the South American Indian group, the Aymara, represent time. When they speak of the future, they use the phrase
back days
and often gesture behind them. Think about it: it is a perfectly logical way to view the world.

If time is displayed along a horizontal line, does it go from left to right or right to left? Either answer is correct because the choice is
arbitrary, just as the choice of whether text should be strung along the page from left to right or right to left is arbitrary. The choice of text direction also corresponds to people's preference for time direction. People whose native language is Arabic or Hebrew prefer time to flow from right to left (the future being toward the left), whereas those who use a left-to-right writing system have time flowing in the same direction, so the future is to the right.

But wait: I'm not finished. Is the time line relative to the person or relative to the environment? In some Australian Aborigine societies, time moves relative to the environment based on the direction in which the sun rises and sets. Give people from this community a set of photographs structured in time (for example, photographs of a person at different ages or a child eating some food) and ask them to order the photographs in time. People from technological cultures would order the pictures from left to right, most recent photo to the right or left, depending upon how their printed language was written. But people from these Australian communities would order them east to west, most recent to the west. If the person were facing south, the photo would be ordered left to right. If the person were facing north, the photos would be ordered right to left. If the person were facing west, the photos would be ordered along a vertical line extending from the body outward, outwards being the most recent. And, of course, were the person facing east, the photos would also be on a line extending out from the body, but with the most recent photo closest to the body.

The choice of metaphor dictates the proper design for interaction. Similar issues show up in other domains. Consider the standard problem of scrolling the text in a computer display. Should the scrolling control move the text or the window? This was a fierce debate in the early years of display terminals, long before the development of modern computer systems. Eventually, there was mutual agreement that the cursor arrow keys—and then, later on, the mouse—would follow the moving window metaphor. Move the window down to see more text at the bottom of the screen. What this meant in practice is that to see more text at the bottom of the screen, move the mouse down, which moves the window
down, so that the text moves up: the mouse and the text move in opposite directions. With the moving text metaphor, the mouse and the text move in the same directions: move the mouse up and the text moves up. For over two decades, everyone moved the scrollbars and mouse down in order to make the text move up.

But then smart displays with touch-operated screens arrived. Now it was only natural to touch the text with the fingers and move it up, down, right, or left directly: the text moved in the same direction as the fingers. The moving text metaphor became prevalent. In fact, it was no longer thought of as a metaphor: it was real. But as people switched back and forth between traditional computer systems that used the moving window metaphor and touch-screen systems that used the moving text model, confusion reigned. As a result, one major manufacturer of both computers and smart screens, Apple, switched everything to the moving text model, but no other company followed Apple's lead. As I write this, the confusion still exists. How will it end? I predict the demise of the moving window metaphor: touch-screens and control pads will dominate, which will cause the moving text model to take over. All systems will move the hands or controls in the same direction as they wish the screen images to move. Predicting technology is relatively easy compared to predictions of human behavior, or in this case, the adoption of societal conventions. Will this prediction be true? You will be able to judge for yourself.

Similar issues occurred in aviation with the pilot's attitude indicator, the display that indicates the airplane's orientation (roll or bank and pitch). The instrument shows a horizontal line to indicate the horizon with a silhouette of an airplane seen from behind. If the wings are level and on a line with the horizon, the airplane is flying in level flight. Suppose the airplane turns to the left, so it banks (tilts) left. What should the display look like? Should it show a left-tilting airplane against a fixed horizon, or a fixed airplane against a right-tilting horizon? The first is correct from the viewpoint of someone watching the airplane from behind, where the horizon is always horizontal: this type of display is called
outside-in
. The second is correct from the viewpoint of the pilot,
where the airplane is always stable and fixed in position, so that when the airplane banks, the horizon tilts: this type of display is called
inside-out
.

In all these cases, every point of view is correct. It all depends upon what you consider to be moving. What does all this mean for design? What is natural depends upon point of view, the choice of metaphor, and therefore, the culture. The design difficulties occur when there is a switch in metaphors. Airplane pilots have to undergo training and testing before they are allowed to switch from one set of instruments (those with an outside-in metaphor, for example) to the other (those with the inside-out metaphor). When countries decided to switch which side of the road cars would drive on, the temporary confusion that resulted was dangerous. (Most places that switched moved from left-side driving to right-side, but a few, notably Okinawa, Samoa, and East Timor, switched from right to left.) In all these cases of convention switches, people eventually adjusted. It is possible to break convention and switch metaphors, but expect a period of confusion until people adapt to the new system.

CHAPTER FOUR

KNOWING WHAT TO DO: CONSTRAINTS, DISCOVERABILITY, AND FEEDBACK

How do we determine how to operate something that we have never seen before? We have no choice but to combine knowledge in the world with that in the head. Knowledge in the world includes perceived affordances and signifiers, the mappings between the parts that appear to be controls or places to manipulate and the resulting actions, and the physical constraints that limit what can be done. Knowledge in the head includes conceptual models; cultural, semantic, and logical constraints on behavior; and analogies between the current situation and previous experiences with other situations.
Chapter 3
was devoted to a discussion of how we acquire knowledge and use it. There, the major emphasis was upon the knowledge in the head. This chapter focuses upon the knowledge in the world: how designers can provide the critical information that allows people to know what to do, even when experiencing an unfamiliar device or situation.

Let me illustrate with an example: building a motorcycle from a Lego set (a children's construction toy). The Lego motorcycle shown in
Figure 4.1
has fifteen pieces, some rather specialized. Of those fifteen pieces, only two pairs are alike—two rectangles with the word
police
on them, and the two hands of
the policeman. Other pieces match one another in size and shape but are different colors. So, a number of the pieces are physically interchangeable—that is, the physical constraints are not sufficient to identify where they go—but the appropriate role for every single piece of the motorcycle is still unambiguously determined. How? By combining cultural, semantic, and logical constraints with the physical ones. As a result, it is possible to construct the motorcycle without any instructions or assistance.

FIGURE 4.1.
   
Lego Motorcycle.
The toy Lego motorcycle is shown assembled (A) and in pieces (B). It has fifteen pieces so cleverly constructed that even an adult can put them together. The design exploits constraints to specify just which pieces fit where. Physical constraints limit alternative placements. Cultural and semantic constraints provide the necessary clues for further decisions. For example, cultural constraints dictate the placement of the three lights (red, blue, and yellow) and semantic constraints stop the user from putting the head backward on the body or the pieces labeled “police” upside down.