The constant process of increasing the number of functions on a single chip while decreasing the size of the chip has meant the speed of a computer operation has increased 230,000-fold just from 1961 to 1989. These days a $1,500 personal computer for the home is easily more powerful than the big, bulky main-frame computers that occupied entire rooms of government and corporate offices 30 years ago. This year, with each of the United States census bureau`s 484 field offices equipped with personal computers, each of those offices will have more computer power than the entire agency had in the 1970 census.
That sort of microwizardry now goes into every imaginable machine. Every home appliance, from old, familiar ones such as steam irons and thermostats to such newer inventions as the VCR, is in effect becoming a digital computer. The power of those machines to help the average person, to free him from drudgery, will happen only if the average person can easily understand and take advantage of its utility.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, most of us cannot understand and take advantage of high tech as it is now designed. What is it worth to you to have microwave ovens with a dozen magical functions if you only use the device to heat water and defrost food? What does it matter to you if you have a 4-event/14-day programmable VCR if, after five years, you have never figured out how to use it other than to play tapes of rented movies?
”Where the failure is,” says IIT`s Owen of high-tech appliances, ”is in design.”
Owen faults manufacturers of high-tech products for largely ignoring the consumers who ultimately use the product. Engineers in these companies spend years in developing a new product. The engineers themselves become so familiar with the new product`s operation that once they have developed a product, they pay scant attention to how the consumer will learn how to operate its functions. Instructional manuals are written almost as an afterthought. The only consumer feedback most manufacturers are interested in is the market share of the product they`ve produced. How well a product sells seems detached from how well it is used by the consumer.
Feldman says he hopes his research will at least prove with hard data that most people are thoroughly baffled with high tech as it is now designed and marketed. Such proof, he says, could spur manufacturers to apply themselves to better product designs that greatly simplify the operation of the products by consumers. He is also a campaigner, both as a business-school academic and a consultant, to rewrite and simplify instructional manuals that manufacturers send out with their products.
”Just to get the jargon out of these manuals and get them translated into plain English would go a long way in making products easier to use,” he says.
At IIT, Owen says he believes market forces ultimately will force vast improvements in high-tech design, making its potential more available to even the most technologically illiterate.
”I think it will change because the market is going to force it to happen,” Owen says. ”International competition in high-tech products is so furious you can come out with a new product no one else has and know you may well get beaten by competition within a year.
”Design is the key factor that is going to separate high-tech companies from survivors and losers in the next 20 years. I`m preaching that all the time. We live in a world market now, selling the same product to people in a welter of nations and cultures. The company that can put out a product that is most easily understandable in terms of the consumer, no matter where he lives or what language he speaks, is the company that is going to come out better in the world market.”
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There are nearly as many ideas on how to eliminate high-tech complexity as there are critics of it. Basically, however, they all say the same thing: Invent more technology to simplify the operation of the technology we already have.
We are now so technology-dependent that we must scramble to invent new technology to solve the problems presented by the technology we already have. Inventions that arrived before most of us were born, things that seem so commonplace now, are so complicated in even their most basic forms that no one individual has enough personal knowledge to know how they work.
Sir Peter Medawar, the British Nobel laureate in medicine, suggests as much in his 1984 essay ”The Limits of Science”:
” . . . in reality we work not by single minds but by consortia of intelligences, past as well as present; for what we think or do now is a function of what others have thought and done before us-people whose past findings and past errors are a part of our own inheritance of understanding.
”Thus a television set (perhaps the most complicated science-based contraption in everyday use) is not within the effective comprehension of any one mind, for there is no one person who knows the electronic and the glass and vacuum technology and has the know-how of plastic molding to such a degree of proficiency that if some holocaust were to obliterate science and technology so that we had to begin again, this one knowlegeable human being could reinstruct and redirect the activities of those who would in due time reconstruct a television set.
”Clearly it was a committee or consortium of engineers and technologists, not any one man, that had the theoretic understanding and practical know-how to build a TV set.”
If you are 40 years old or older, you probably remember the earliest black-and-white TV sets. Those early sets may seem now, in retrospect, almost quaint compared to the sets available today. They were, in fact, highly complex and troublesome to their users.
Feldman says he worked his way through college as a house-calling TV repairman in the 1950s. In those days, all controls on a TV set were located in the front, dials easily operated by the user. Some controls were easy to understand and necessary for day-to-day use. On-Off. Volume. Brightness. Contrast. Others were less easily understood and often got the user into trouble. Horizontal Hold. Vertical Hold. Horizontal Linearity. Vertical Linearity.
Much of his time, Feldman says, was spent on house calls simply readjusting the latter controls after the TV owners had thrown them hopelessly out of adjustment, making their picture either unwatchable or nonexistent.
”In effect, the demands of this complex product exceeded the capabilities of many of its users,” Feldman says. ”Ultimately, the problem was `solved` by television manufacturers by moving the more infrequently used controls to the back of the set and recessing them so that they were not user- accessible.”
With the advent of color television, consumers again fell into the trap of the new technology when, in fiddling with the color controls, they threw the color balance hopelessly out of whack. Eventually, technology came to the rescue with the development of a one-button, automatic color adjustment.
Indeed, Feldman says, the color-adjustment button-a sort of panic-button solution-could serve as a model for simplifying some of the newer complex high-tech appliances.
”There is a need,” he says, ”to incorporate operation-simplification features in future high-tech products. Such `simplification` may entail applications of sophisticated technology that may add to costs.”
Many technologists believe complex high-tech machines can be simplified with the principles of human-factors engineering. A sort of synthesis of traditional engineering and psychology, human-factors engineers work in tandem-in committee, so to speak-with product designers to make machines and products operable and understandable through normal human logic.
”The human brain isn`t evolving as fast as the developing complexity of technology,” Wiggins says. ”That shouldn`t be as alarming as it sounds. There are two messages here. First, you aren`t dumb and aren`t alone in your bafflement over high tech. Second, the fault is in the design of the technology, not in you. There is a solution, and it`s in good human-factors engineering.”
A good example is how most VCR manufacturers in the last couple of years have gone a long way in overcoming the complexity of their advance-programming functions. The earlier models demanded that the user throw switches and push a sequence of buttons to program the machine to record a desired program on a specific channel at a future time and date. The sequence, while logical for the machine, made no apparent sense to the user. The user blindly had to trust to luck that he had thrown the proper switches and punched the right buttons at the right times to get the machine to do what he wanted it to do.
With the principles of human-factors engineering, the recording process, while perhaps no less complex, at least became visible and understandable. This was done by putting the process on the TV screen itself, giving the user a clearly described set of tasks to complete. The user still, of course, has to punch the proper sequence of buttons, but now he can see that he has programmed the proper date, time and channel he wants recorded. The task makes sense and gives the user the comforting feedback that the machine is responding as he wishes it to.
”In other words,” says Norman, ”make sure that (1) the user can figure out what to do, and (2) the user can tell what is going on.”
If, as so many critics charge, the complexity of high tech is a problem caused by bad design, why do consumers put up with it? Why are most Americans happy to lay down hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an appliance they often never learn how to properly use? In this realm, the individual consumer must bear much of the blame personally.
Americans buy VCRs, microwave ovens, personal computers and whatever else is new on the market perhaps as much for the presumed status such ownership seems to impart as for the intrinsic functions of these devices. In other words, it still is very important for Americans to keep up with the Joneses. Bombarded by advertising, seeing friends, family, and neighbors acquiring these devices, sooner or later we find ourselves ponying up money for them, too.
Operating VCRs early in the 1980s, particularly programming the recording functions, was extremely complex and difficult to comprehend. But it did not stop people from buying them, even when a sensible alternative was offered. In 1984 the electronics industry introduced the videocassette player (VCP), a much cheaper, simpler machine in that it could only play videocassette tapes. It had no capability of recording off the user`s television set, so it had no confusing maze of buttons to push or instructions to follow. It seemed, as so many people used their expensive VCRs only for playing tapes, the less expensive VCP would have made good sense and a potential high-sales volume item.
The VCP, however, had very anemic sales. In 1988 only 170,000 of them were sold, compared to 13 million VCRs, barely 1 percent of the market. The VCPs are not much in evidence in retail showrooms. Many don`t keep them in stock, while others may offer only one or two models.
”They may not have been promoted very well,” Tom Lauterback, an electronics-industry spokesman, says of the dismal VCP sales performance.
”If millions of people would have bought them (VCPs), the price would have come way down. As it is, you can buy a cheaper VCR with all the record functions now for $200 to $250. I can`t sell a VCP for any less than that, so people probably opt for a full-function VCR when it is just as cheap, anyway.”
Feldman believes that high tech is so much in vogue that often buyers are seduced by the high tech ”look” of an appliance as much as they are by its supposed functionality.
”It`s analgous to one`s eyes being bigger than one`s stomach at a smorgasbord,” he says. ”Occasionally salespeople emphasize features irrelevant to the consumer`s needs to make a sale, or, conversely, the consumer accepts irrelevant features to get a desired feature that is part of the package.
”The latter case is exemplified by one respondent (to Feldman`s research questionnaire), who uses only 2 of the 17 features on her full-featured microwave oven. She selected that model because she `did not want the
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”cheaper looking” models,` and she wanted one with a touch keypad rather than a knob or a dial.”
The woman`s response must have a familiar ring to it for anybody who has shopped for a high-tech appliance. We look at the cheapest models in the showroom, but we don`t want to bring home something that looks a little cheesy. We are dazzled by the more expensive models that are festooned with orderly ranks and rows of push buttons. But once we get them home, we are intimidated by the same push buttons when we have to select them in proper sequence to get our newly purchased contraptions to work.
”The jazz of new technology in advertisements-the glitz and glamor-is more powerful to the potential buyer than the usability of the product,” says Professor Chris Wiggins, a specialist in aviation psychology at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. ”The more buttons, the better.
”If people continue to buy high-tech appliances on the basis of looks, the manufacturers will provide them with what they want. If complicated operating procedures don`t seem to affect sales, why would the manufacturer go to great lengths and expense to simplify the design?”
Aha. If the American consumer can feel relieved that he really isn`t so stupid, after all, that high-tech appliances really are complex and difficult to operate, there still is no room for smugness. We have had these expensive, underused contraptions around us now for 10 years or more. Had we consumers been slightly less starry-eyed by the allure and newness of high-tech products and slightly more demanding in terms of high-tech`s real utility in terms of ease of operation, manufacturers might today be offering far better designs.
We haven`t been very demanding, however, and the manufacturers haven`t, in large part, seen the need to alter their design and marketing strategies. And still, when something new comes out, when something else is described as state of the art, we dutifully march out and buy it, probably knowing deep in our hearts that the infernal machine will, in the end, defy our mastery. If you feel stupid for doing that, you are in plenty good company.