Computers and the Internet promise to invade every aspect of daily life, which is fine if you know how to use them. But many don’t.
For example, the computer mouse commonly comes in one-, two- and three-button varieties. Sometimes you click once to make it work, sometimes twice. It’s a new twist on the technological challenges of 20 years ago, when programming the VCR or getting the classroom video projector to cooperate was an ordeal. Only now, there are even more maddening appliances with which to wrestle.
Alan Cooper, president of Cooper Interaction Design in Palo Alto, Calif., makes the consumer experience his business. A software designer and developer who has done consulting work for such companies as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems, he’s the author of “The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.” Cooper met recently with Mercury News Staff Writer Jon Fortt. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Q–Why is today’s software so tough for many people to use?
A–No. 1, it’s tough to use because it’s tough to use. A lot of people think that it’s tough to use because they’re dumb. Or it’s tough to use because they’re not computer-literate enough. Or, “Well, my kids, they know how to work computers. But not me, I’m just an old fuddy-duddy.” And that’s just wrong-think. They’re hard to use because people who don’t care about you or me, or customers out there, are making hard-to-use Web sites and software services. The No. 1 reason why they’re making it hard to use is they’re not paying much attention as they create it.
Q–In your new book, you address software design as a safety issue. Can you explain what software has to do with safety?
A–My wife just bought a new car. It’s a beautiful car, a Mercedes-Benz, and the car is a joy to drive. All that mechanical, Industrial-Age stuff about it has really been perfected by those German engineers. Then it has this console in the middle, and it’s not one of those sophisticated, high-tech consoles. This one has a radio and a climate control system, and it’s very unsafe. Because they did not do the kind of goal-directed design that we would do. Instead they have a whole series of buttons that are all the same shape, all the same size, all adjacent to each other. They’re all black with a dark gray background, and they all have dark gray legends in 8-point type. And when you’re driving along, the button that changes the radio station is right next to the button that turns the radio off. They’re hard to distinguish.
The problem is what the automobile designers call head-down time. There’s a lot of head-down time in this beautiful car, to set the temperature right. And if you want to make the speakers in the back louder than the speakers in the front, you have to go through a hierarchical drill-down menu of buttons. It is absolutely not safe to do that when the car is moving. People do it now with cell phones. There are bumper stickers that say “Hang up and drive.”
Q–You’re known as “The Father of Visual Basic,” which is essentially a set of tools developers use to create software applications. It’s been 10 years since you handed Microsoft the backbone of the Visual Basic product. How do you think it has turned out?
A–You have to understand that I never worked for Microsoft. I was an outside guy, and I invented a product and sold it to Microsoft, and it was a visual programming language for end-users. There were reasonably computer-savvy end-users, circa 1988, compared to end-users of today. But I saw it very much as a thing for consumers, for people who wanted to get productive work done, not for people who wanted to build tools for other people to get productive work done.
So I would say the big difference happened 12 years ago when I first sold it to Microsoft. They decided that the needs of humans were subordinate to the needs of programmers–which tells you a lot about Microsoft, and tells you a lot about me. I was very frustrated about their decision. I wasn’t happy with it. I came to peace with it because Visual Basic has done really well, and was a big success.
A lot of people think, and Microsoft is happy to let them think, that all great things are invented by Microsoft. In fact, very, very little has been invented by Microsoft. What Microsoft is really good at is endlessly iterating and revving–incrementally improving things that already exist–and those things that already exist are generally acquired from the outside.
Q–As you look out on the technology landscape today, is there some area in particular that desperately needs to be simplified?
A–Yes. Without a doubt, the killer app in the universe today, bar none, is electronic mail. E-mail is the most influential application ever to appear on a personal computer and it remains sadly deficient. Now, people say, “I’ve got Outlook and I can look at e-mails, and I can organize stuff.” Well, that’s what we said about our desktop computers before we had the World Wide Web. At each step of the way we say, “This is pretty good,” and then the next thing comes along, and we say, “Whoa, this is really good now! Now, we’re really cooking.” I don’t know about you, but I get about 100 e-mails a day. And I cannot manage them.
If I leave town like I did for the last three days, basically I’m about 200 e-mails down, and it’s going to take me days to dig out. I can’t tell the difference between important e-mail and spam. And the thing is, the tools are incredibly weak. What happens is nobody will mess with it. Even when you have something like the Palm, which has a whole new platform, what they did was pretty much cloned e-mail. So for the amount of time and effort, and the dependence we have on electronic mail, it’s amazing to me the lack of innovation that goes into it. We have a lot of ideas on how to fix it.
More Top Picks Air Conditioners
The problem is, of course, you don’t dip your toe into the e-mail world, because you’ve got the 500-pound gorilla sitting there. I mean, I think it’s a world where you can compete, but you don’t do it with a start-up’s budget. Well, you do it the way you do Webvan as a start-up.
Q–Throw a few billion at it?
A–Right. But tell me there aren’t billions to be made in e-mail!