The Design of Everyday Things (45 page)

       
•
  
Secret doors, cabinets, and safes: you don't want the average person even to know that they are there, let alone to be able to work them.

       
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Cases deliberately intended to disrupt the normal routine action (as discussed in
Chapter 5
). Examples include the acknowledgment required before permanently deleting a file from a computer, safeties on pistols and rifles, and pins in fire extinguishers.

       
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Controls that require two simultaneous actions before the system will operate, with the controls separated so that it takes two people to work them, preventing a single person from doing an unauthorized action (used in security systems or safety-critical operations).

       
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Cabinets and bottles for medications and dangerous substances deliberately made difficult to open to keep them secure from children.

       
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Games, a category in which designers deliberately flout the laws of understandability and usability. Games are meant to be difficult; in some games, part of the challenge is to figure out what is to be done, and how.

Even where a lack of usability or understandability is deliberate, it is still important to know the rules of understandable and usable design, for two reasons. First, even deliberately difficult designs aren't entirely difficult. Usually there is one difficult part, designed to keep unauthorized people from using the device; the rest of it should follow the normal principles of good design. Second, even if your job is to make something difficult to do, you need to know how to go about doing it. In this case, the rules are useful, for they state in reverse just how to go about the task. You could systematically violate the rules like this:

       
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Hide critical components: make things invisible.

       
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Use unnatural mappings for the execution side of the action cycle, so that the relationship of the controls to the things being controlled is inappropriate or haphazard.

       
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Make the actions physically difficult to do.

       
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Require precise timing and physical manipulation.

       
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Do not give any feedback.

       
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Use unnatural mappings for the evaluation side of the action cycle, so that system state is difficult to interpret.

Safety systems pose a special problem in design. Oftentimes, the design feature added to ensure safety eliminates one danger, only to create a secondary one. When workers dig a hole in a street, they must put up barriers to prevent cars and people from falling into the hole. The barriers solve one problem, but they themselves pose another danger, often mitigated by adding signs and flashing lights to warn of the barriers. Emergency doors, lights, and alarms must often be accompanied by warning signs or barriers that control when and how they can be used.

Design: Developing Technology for People

Design is a marvelous discipline, bringing together technology and people, business and politics, culture and commerce. The different pressures on design are severe, presenting huge challenges to the designer. At the same time, the designers must always keep foremost in mind that the products are to be used by people. This is what makes design such a rewarding discipline: On the one hand, woefully complex constraints to overcome; on the other hand, the opportunity to develop things that assist and enrich the lives of people, that bring benefits and enjoyment.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DESIGN IN THE WORLD OF BUSINESS

The realities of the world impose severe constraints upon the design of products. Up to now I have described the ideal case, assuming that human-centered design principles could be followed in a vacuum; that is, without attention to the real world of competition, costs, and schedules. Conflicting requirements will come from different sources, all of which are legitimate, all of which need to be resolved. Compromises must be made by all involved.

Now it is time to examine the concerns outside of human-centered design that affect the development of products. I start with the impact of competitive forces that drive the introduction of extra features, often to excess: the cause of the disease dubbed “featuritis,” whose major symptom is
“creeping featurism.” From there, I examine the drivers of change, starting with technological drivers. When new technologies emerge, there is a temptation to develop new products immediately. But the time for radically new products to become successful is measured in years, decades, or in some instances centuries. This causes me to examine the two forms of product innovation relevant to design: incremental (less glamorous, but most common) and radical (most glamorous, but rarely successful).

I conclude with reflections about the history and future prospects of this book. The first edition of this book has had a long and fruitful life. Twenty-five years is an amazingly long time for a book centered around technology to have remained relevant. If this revised and expanded edition lasts an equally long time, that means fifty years of
The Design of Everyday Things
. In these next twenty-five years, what new developments will take place? What will be the role of technology in our lives, for the future of books, and what are the moral obligations of the design profession? And finally, for how long will the principles in this book remain relevant? It should be no surprise that I believe they will always be just as relevant as they were twenty-five years ago, just as relevant as they are today. Why? The reason is simple. The design of technology to fit human needs and capabilities is determined by the psychology of people. Yes, technologies may change, but people stay the same.

Competitive Forces

Today, manufacturers around the world compete with one another. The competitive pressures are severe. After all, there are only a few basic ways by which a manufacturer can compete: three of the most important being price, features, and quality—unfortunately often in that order of importance. Speed is important, lest some other company get ahead in the rush for market presence. These pressures make it difficult to follow the full, iterative process of continual product improvement. Even relatively stable home products, such as automobiles, kitchen appliances, television sets, and computers, face the multiple forces of a competitive market that encourage the introduction of changes without sufficient testing and refinement.

Here is a simple, real example. I am working with a new startup company, developing an innovative line of cooking equipment. The founders had some unique ideas, pushing the technology of cooking far ahead of anything available for homes. We did numerous field tests, built numerous prototypes, and engaged a world-class industrial designer. We modified the original product concept several times, based on early feedback from potential users and
advice from industry experts. But just as we were about to commission the first production of a few hand-tooled working prototypes that could be shown to potential investors and customers (an expensive proposition for the small self-funded company), other companies started displaying similar concepts in the trade shows. What? Did they steal the ideas? No, it's what is called the
Zeitgeist
, a German word meaning “spirit of the time.” In other words, the time was ripe, the ideas were “in the air.” The competition emerged even before we had delivered our first product. What is a small, startup company to do? It doesn't have money to compete with the large companies. It has to modify its ideas to keep ahead of the competition and come up with a demonstration that excites potential customers and wows potential investors and, more importantly, potential distributors of the product. It is the distributors who are the real customers, not the people who eventually buy the product in stores and use it in their homes. The example illustrates the real business pressures on companies: the need for speed, the concern about costs, the competition that may force the company to change its offerings, and the need to satisfy several classes of customers—investors, distributors, and, of course, the people who will actually use the product. Where should the company focus its limited resources? More user studies? Faster development? New, unique features?

The same pressures that the startup faced also impact established companies. But they have other pressures as well. Most products have a development cycle of one to two years. In order to bring out a new model every year, the design process for the new model has to have started even before the previous model has been released to customers. Moreover, mechanisms for collecting and feeding back the experiences of customers seldom exist. In an earlier era, there was close coupling between designers and users. Today, they are separated by barriers. Some companies prohibit designers from working with customers, a bizarre and senseless restriction. Why would they do this? In part to prevent leaks of the new developments to the competition, but also in part because customers may
stop purchasing the current offerings if they are led to believe that a new, more advanced item is soon to come. But even where there are no such restrictions, the complexity of large organizations coupled with the relentless pressure to finish the product makes this interaction difficult. Remember Norman's Law of
Chapter 6
: The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.

FEATURITIS: A DEADLY TEMPTATION

In every successful product there lurks the carrier of an insidious disease called “featuritis,” with its main symptom being “creeping featurism.” The disease seems to have been first identified and named in 1976, but its origins probably go back to the earliest technologies, buried far back in the eons prior to the dawn of history. It seems unavoidable, with no known prevention. Let me explain.

Suppose we follow all the principles in this book for a wonderful, human-centered product. It obeys all design principles. It overcomes people's problems and fulfills some important needs. It is attractive and easy to use and understand. As a result, suppose the product is successful: many people buy it and tell their friends to buy it. What could be wrong with this?

The problem is that after the product has been available for a while, a number of factors inevitably appear, pushing the company toward the addition of new features—toward creeping featurism. These factors include:

       
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Existing customers like the product, but express a wish for more features, more functions, more capability.

       
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A competing company adds new features to its products, producing competitive pressures to match that offering, but to do even more in order to get ahead of the competition.

       
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Customers are satisfied, but sales are declining because the market is saturated: everyone who wants the product already has it. Time to add wonderful enhancements that will cause people to want the new model, to upgrade.

Featuritis is highly infectious. New products are invariably more complex, more powerful, and different in size than the first release of a product. You can see that tension playing out in music players, mobile phones, and computers, especially on smart phones, tablets, and pads. Portable devices get smaller and smaller with each release, despite the addition of more and more features (making them ever more difficult to operate). Some products, such as automobiles, home refrigerators, television sets, and kitchen stoves, also increase in complexity with each release, getting larger and more powerful.

But whether the products get larger or smaller, each new edition invariably has more features than the previous one. Featuritis is an insidious disease, difficult to eradicate, impossible to vaccinate against. It is easy for marketing pressures to insist upon the addition of new features, but there is no call—or for that matter, budget—to get rid of old, unneeded ones.

How do you know when you have encountered featuritis? By its major symptom: creeping featurism. Want an example? Look at
Figure 7.1
, which illustrates the changes that have overcome the simple Lego motorcycle since my first encounter with it for the first edition of this book. The original motorcycle (
Figure 4.1
and
Figure 7.1A
) had only fifteen components and could be put together without any instructions: it had sufficient constraints that every piece had a unique location and orientation. But now, as
Figure 7.1B
shows, the same motorcycle has become bloated, with twenty-nine pieces. I needed instructions.