You wake up dry-mouthed and perspiring. The house is too hot because you never could figure out how to properly set your two-year-old, state-of-the-art, push-button programmable thermostat. You momentarily panic, looking at your year-old, state-of-the-art multifunctional digital watch, thinking you overslept an hour. Your panic subsides when you remember the watch is an hour fast, still set on daylight-saving time because last fall you never could figure out which buttons you needed to push to reset the watch to standard time.
After you have showered and dressed, your son calls you into the family room. He is sitting at the family computer, a marvelous machine that only your children seem to fully comprehend and successfully operate. You have tried, but the vast array of push buttons is too confusing. Your son, trying to finish a civics term paper at the last minute, has been stymied by the state-of-the-art spell-check function. The word your son needs to know how to spell-perestroika-is too new to have been included in the spell-check list. You go to the garage and retrieve some old newsmagazines, riffling through them until you find the word and pass on the spelling to your son.
Now you are running a bit late. In the kitchen, you opt for a cup of instant coffee, sliding a cup of tap water into your three-year-old, state-of- the-art, push-button programmable microwave oven to heat it up. You feel a bit chagrined because neither you nor your spouse has really figured out how to use the microwave other than to heat up water and defrost food. As you wait for your water to boil, you feel no better as you glance around the room and find your eyes resting on your eight-year-old, state-of-the-art food processor gathering dust in a corner of the kitchen counter. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but you never did master all the push buttons and paraphernalia needed just to shred a carrot.
With your water now hot, you stir in your coffee and sit down for a fast scan of the morning paper. Hmm-mm. PBS is going to rebroadcast a series you`d like to see again, the one in which that interesting English fellow tracks the development of technology through history. You`d love to see it, but you`re taking the whole family out to dinner tonight, so you won`t be home when it`s on. If only you knew how to operate your state-of-the-art videocassette recorder. (When you bought it six years ago, it was a major triumph just to hook it up to your television set so that you could watch some rented movies.) The idea of using its push-button programmable features to record television shows while you were away from home became an anguished, impossible proposition after a few minutes of trying to decode the
hieroglyphics that the manufacturer passed off as the VCR`s user`s manual.
Rushing out the door, you jump into your new car and head for work. Your daughter used the car last night, so you have to fumble with the car`s state- of-the-art digital radio to turn down the ear-splitting volume. That done, you try to switch from the rock station she had been listening to. You want the drive-time morning news program, but there are so many push buttons and functions on the radio controls that you are tilting sideways at a 45-degree angle as you try to drive and figure out the radio at the same time. An urgent, uncomfortably close blast of a car horn jolts you upright. Whew. You were so absorbed in the radio your car had begun drifting into the next lane. Chastened, you somehow manage to turn off the radio completely and drive the rest of the way to work in silence.
In the office, you haven`t even taken off your coat when you hear the warbling of your telephone, one of those new, state-of-the-art,
multifunctional office ”instruments” with a couple dozen push buttons. You hate it. Telephones used to ring, but now they warble, ululate or beep electronically. You pick it up. It`s the president of the company, and he has misdialed in trying to call your boss, reaching you instead. The president is calling long distance, and he`s in a hurry, so he wants you to transfer him to the correct number.
Ahem. You have been using this new system for a year and a half, but you have never mastered the transfer function. ”Just a moment,” you say as you fumble through your desk for the telephone instructional manual. Nervously, you try to follow the instructions as you hit a sequence of buttons that is supposed to effect the transfer. In the end, you fail. The company president is off in some distant city impatiently holding a dead phone. You are at your desk, your own phone emitting some sort of dreadful, high-pitched squawk that seemingly ridicules your stupidity and your desperate fear of technological inadequacy.
The scenario above, while exaggeratedly compressed into about two hours in the life of a fictional American, is not very far-fetched. At least Laurence P. Feldman, a marketing professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, doesn`t think so.
Feldman believes the American home is filling up with high-tech appliances that rarely get used to the full potential for which the appliances were designed. They don`t get used, Feldman says, because they are badly designed. They are simply too complicated to operate. They are too complicated to operate, he says, because the people who design these products pay too little attention to how much patience, fortitude and ability consumers must have to learn how to use high-tech functions after they purchase appliances and bring them home.
”People buy these machines in good faith,” Feldman says, ”often buying higher-priced models with the most functions designed into them, fully believing they will learn how to use them when they get them home. When they get them home, however, they discover they can`t understand the instructional booklets that come with the machines. They become frightened by the profusion of buttons and switches on the machine and are satisfied to learn how to operate just the basic functions.
”The result is underutilized products and consumer frustration and disillusionment,” Feldman says.
The number of such products increases every year. Customer frustration will likely increase every year, he says, unless the average consumer becomes more adept at handling high-tech machinery or until manufacturers find a way to simplify the operation of their gadgets. Feldman says he doesn`t foresee the average American expanding his individual capabilities to master technology on a wide scale.
”In the American population, 20 percent of all adults are illiterate, and we have more and more people who are in difficulty even reading street signs,” he says. ”Now, at the outset of the so-called information age spawned by microtechnology, we are asking this same population to be even more skillful than ever before.
”We have two forces diverging: what technology can provide and the population`s ability to absorb the new technology.”
Feldman is quick to emphasize that the problems of high tech are not the result of the stupidity of the average consumer. He admits to his own horror stories with high-tech in his own home. The problem, he believes, is that manufacturers aren`t paying attention to their customers, and he is out to prove it.
Besides being an academic, Feldman is past president of the Product Development and Management Association, an international organization that reviews how new products are developed and marketed. In that capacity, he says, he began his interest in how little used high-tech appliances had become. He said he pored through the available literature and discovered little interest had been shown academically or commercially in quantifying how people used their high-tech appliances.
He began to informally poll his marketing students, both graduate and undergraduate, and discovered, anecdotally, that everybody he asked was having problems with high tech. Developing a standardized questionnaire, he began to more scientifically quantify the amount of trouble people are having, using a sampling of college students at first. Now he is widening his sample to nonstudent populations, circulating his questionnaire among cooperative groups such as trade unions. He said he hopes to build a solid data base that will quantitatively show how frustrated people have become.
”I`m not a latter-day Luddite who wants to break the machines that serve us,” Feldman says. ”But while consumers have been busy acquiring all these marvels of modern technology, they have also been paying a price in terms of their complexity.”
You don`t have to ask many people before you find out how deeply consumer frustration is running. More than likely, you only have to talk to the person who is nearest at hand, and you will soon hear a flood of admissions, usually slightly self-deprecatory, about failed personal encounters with high tech.
”We have this incredible electronic equipment that could probably bring down astronauts if we only knew how to use it,” Mary Pat Hay says. She and her husband, Bill, both fortysomething professionals, live in a stylish high- rise condominium on Chicago`s Near North Side.
”Earlier this year we bought a new armoire to house our entertainment gadgets, and then we decided to get new gadgets,” she says. ”We bought a stereo TV that cost $1,400, and because it was stereo, we had to get a stereo VCR, which was $490. Along with all that, we decided to get a compact-disc player, tuner and new speakers.
”The TV, VCR and CD each had its own remote control. The controls for the CD player look like the galley of a spaceship. It has 64 buttons on it. I can understand a few of them. AM/FM, that`s okay. But most of them, I have no idea. Sea Control? Sea Display? Sea Level +? Sea On/Off? Forget the instructions. Both Bill and I are well educated, and we tried valiantly to get through the instruction manual, but the instructions look like the blueprints for Sears Tower.”
She says she has found a novel way of dealing with the three remote-control devices. She gets up, walks across the room and operates the machines manually. Despite their having three VCRs, only one of them, she says, is ever used to record programs. That is the one in Bill`s den, permanently programmed to record just one show, ”Wall Street Week” at 7:30 p.m. Friday on WTTW-Ch. 11.
The absurdity of the wasted functions of the machines is not lost on the Hays, but they certainly are not embarrassed by their lack of mastery.
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”My brother-in-law has a plaque on his wall from the president of the United States thanking him for his brilliant work in designing the computer-testing programs for the Apollo moon shot,” she says. ”But he readily admits he can no more operate his family VCR than he can sew a dress. If he isn`t embarrassed, why should I be?”
Her sentiments would be appreciated by Bernie Brown, a 57-year-old Chicago dog trainer and lifelong audio-equipment buff and savant.
”I got my first hi-fi set in 1944,” Brown says. ”I`ve been buying and assembling components since then. I know a little bit about technology, and I enjoy tinkering with it . . . but I got a new VCR about a year ago, and I swear I could no more set it up than I could fly to the moon.
”My wife has a college degree, and I have a master`s degree, and we could not figure it out. I called up some very dear friends. He`s a very smart man, college educated, and his wife has a master`s degree. We spent 4 1/2 hours working with it. The instructions seemed plain enough. They were there, step by step, in black and white, but in 4 1/2 hours, we could not figure it out.”
Eventually, Brown says he hired a firm that specializes in setting up electronics equipment to set up the machine and show him how to use it.
”Basically,” Brown says, ”I can operate it only by rote. I have to memorize the steps. A machine like that, it can frighten you. It`s like a little monster sitting there, and I don`t want to make it mad. When I buy or rent a tape, I just want to put the tape into the machine, let it play, and have the machine spit it out when it`s done.”
People far more immersed in technology than the Hays or the Browns are just as stymied by high tech as they are.
Donald A. Norman, director of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California in San Diego, published a book, ”The Psychology of Everyday Things,” in 1988. Essentially a condemnation of the design process in the high-tech industry, it became something of a best seller among product engineers and designers. Norman begins his book by quoting a man exasperatedly complaining to him about the man`s new digital watch:
”You would need an engineering degree from MIT to work this.”
”Well,” says Norman, ”I have an engineering degree from MIT. Give me a few hours, and I can figure out the watch. But why should it take hours?”
Kenneth Olsen, the engineer and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., one of the pioneering and now most powerful high-tech companies in the world, once admitted he couldn`t figure out how to heat a cup of coffee in his office microwave oven.
Chris Wiggins, an aviation psychology specialist in Champaign/Urbana, is much in demand as a consultant to aircraft makers trying to design safer, more understandable aircraft controls. As such, he is on the road a lot and is a heavy user of rental cars.
”My pet peeve is with digital car radios,” Wiggins says. ”They have scores of buttons that aren`t very clear as to what they`re supposed to do. They have a very impressive, high-tech look about them, but I would think they could be dangerous if a person is on the road and all of a sudden gets so preoccupied with figuring out the radio he forgets about the main task at hand-driving the car.”
Charles Owen, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology`s Institute of Design, is something of a guru to manufacturers of all sorts of high-tech appliances. He spends a good deal of time in Japan consulting with high-tech companies on design problems. Recently, he says, he bought a $650 35-mm camera made in Japan with dozens of automated, computerized features incorporated into it.
”I do a lot of photography connected with my work, and I thought this particular camera might eliminate some of the technical guesswork for me,”
Owen says. ”As soon as I sat down with it after I bought it, I found a number of serious design errors. It came with an eighth-inch-thick instructional manual, and every time I have to do something complex with the camera, I have to spend another hour with that manual. I`d guess I`ve spent 20 hours with the manual so far. It`s simply too complex. I can`t remember all the instructional steps from one session to the next, so every time I have to struggle through the manual again.”
If these sorts of men, possessing the technological knowledge they do, have such difficulty with common consumer items, what hope is there for ordinary mortals? At least their perplexity would seem to relieve the average consumer of any guilt he or she might feel over failing to fully understand high-tech appliances.
Author Norman says he believes many, if not most, consumers mistakenly blame themselves for their own supposed ineptitude when it comes to high tech. ”If we believe that others are able to use the device and if we believe that it is not very complex, then we conclude that any difficulties must be our own fault,” Norman says in his book. ”Suppose the fault really lies in the device, so that lots of people have the same problems. Because everyone perceives the fault to be his or her own, nobody wants to admit having trouble. This creates a conspiracy of silence, maintaining the feelings of guilt and helplessness among users.”
When we speak of high tech, we are really talking about microtechnology. Microtechnology was born with the invention of the transistor at Bell Telephone`s laboratories in New Jersey in 1947. Transistor technology evolved into microchip technology. The microchip, arguably the 20th Century`s most incredible and incredibly useful invention, is really a computer inscribed on a tiny piece of processed aluminum and silicon dioxide (sand and oxygen). Scientists are increasing the power of chips and microcircuitry year by year, literally by quantum leaps.