Simplexity Of Our Gadgets

[kowalskil]

I am reading "Simplexity," the 2008 book by J. Kluger. He writes:

"Electronic devices ... have gone mad. It is not just your TV or your camera or your twenty-seven-button cell phone with its twenty-one different screen menus and its 124-page instruction manual. ... The act of buying nearly any electronic product has gone from the straightforward plug-and-play experience it used to be to a laborious, joy-killing experience in unpacking, reading, puzzling out, configuring, testing, cursing, reconfiguring, stopping altogether to call the customer support line, then calling again an hour or two later, until you finally get whatever it is you've bought operating in some tentative configuration that more or less does all the things you want it to do--at least until some error message causes the whole precarious assembly to crash and you have to start it all over again. ... "

 

After elaborating on this topic (for several pages), the author concludes that "there's necessarily complex and then there's absurdly complex."

 

What he does not analyze, at least in the chapter I am reading, is the effect all this may have on the minds of our push-button youngsters. Push-button experience is very different from building radios, repairing grandfather clocks, tractors, cars, etc. Will the overall effect be positive or negative? What do you think?

[Buffy]

Oh boy! User Interface design! That's my favorite topic! :cheer:

 

After elaborating on this topic (for several pages), the author concludes that "there's necessarily complex and then there's absurdly complex."

 

Appliances of all types and kinds were pretty simple affairs with the limits of pure-mechanical and electro-mechanical making it hard for any device to have too many options.

 

A lot of early technology benefited from manufacturers recognizing that imitation is the sincerest form of product design, and before the lawyers went nuts on applying for patents on the most trivial features, standardization of things like TV channel dials, car pedals and shifters, washing machine controls, etc. made it easy to use your new gizmo. Sadly, those days are gone. Sadly, aside from these entrenched legacy designs, these days of "learn once, use forever" are long gone.

 

Early electronic gizmos were limited by the fact that each button on them really had to have a dedicated set of circuits to perform the feature, greatly limiting the number of buttons you could even try to incorporate (let alone having multiple buttons actually interact with each other), and the design actually proceeded from the point of view of "what do I want to have some set of buttons/switches/lights do?" It was all very oriented toward what the user actually wanted.

 

The introduction of microprocessors like the TMS 1000, Intel 4004 and 8008 vastly simplified making complex operations, and led to a proliferation of buttons for all the different features. But at least if the button was labeled "rewind" you knew what was going to happen when you pressed it.

 

The curse of as embedded processors was the 10-digit keypad being applied to everything to make them "easily programmable" so that the gizmo could do a LOT of different things, and most importantly reduce manufacturing costs by drastically dropping the total number of buttons you needed (which used to be quite expensive). This has pretty much been a failure, and we're still waiting for it to go away, as it SHOULD because with the dropping cost of the kinds of displays we're used to on our smartphones.

 

I am having to train myself right now on my new microwave because the old one required an extra button press and I still find myself trying to hit the phantom button, a button that was there solely because the designer wanted to push the programming onto me rather than make his developer work harder. :P

 

We're actually starting to see more of this "re-simplification through technology" now that the costs of LCD touch screens is going through the floor. I was looking at a refrigerator this weekend that has what amounts to an iPad in the door. As well as pulling up recipes (something I think is not well thought out), this thing has a visual display of temperature monitoring that lets you see and adjust the thing to deal with weather and kids opening the thing 4822 times a day.

 

What he does not analyze, at least in the chapter I am reading, is the effect all this may have on the minds of our push-button youngsters. Push-button experience is very different from building radios, repairing grandfather clocks, tractors, cars, etc. Will the overall effect be positive or negative? What do you think?

Now I am a product of the teevee generation and have a notoriously short attention span and scanning/multi-tasking skills that have always driven my parents and grandparents nuts. But I've been writing computer programs since I was 12, and like cars, "I just drive 'em, I don't know how to make it work." I can drift a car and throw web apps together, but no clue as to how to rebuild a transmission or much more than plugging in memory cards on a motherboard.

 

So, in your description, I'm already a goner, let alone my daughter who grew up not knowing what it's like not to have a computer in every room of the house, 500 channels on teevee and has had cellphone since she was 10 (and a smart one since 13).

 

A basic problem of course is that all this stuff we've got is so complicated, it's virtually impossible to "repair" at a cost not exorbitantly higher than just buying a new one. While previous generations call that wasteful, my daughter--who's about to go off to college majoring in "Sustainability" so she knows about these things--argues that recycling is better than fixing. There's no way to get the advantages of highly integrated hardware at a low initial cost without basically completely sacrificing "fixability", and if you did everything would be more expensive, and require more resources, so it's always going to be less efficient and less environmentally sound.

 

Now personally, I can tell you that programming is as much a part of the "manufacturing" as soldering the chips onto the board inside the machine. In fact it can be argued that mentally, this activity is a completely functional replacement for the "rebuilding the carburetor" and "repairing the grandfather clock". While I make a living writing in old style computer languages, my eyes can glaze over as my daughter talks about all the obscure things you can do in a tumblr blog using little known incantations.

 

Change is the constant. I don't think we're doomed, just evolving! :cheer:

 

 

In case you're worried about what's going to become of the younger generation, it's going to grow up and start worrying about the younger generation, :phones:

Buffy

[blamski]

My 7 year old son proves to me again and again that the majority of our gadgets are increasingly intuitive. especially if you are approaching them for the first time and don't need to override our previously learned modes of interaction. i never showed him how to use my iphone, but he knows. i never showed him how to use the remote for the TV and the TV's interactive menu system, but he knows. and i don't remember showing him ever how to warm his own bed time glass of milk in the microwave but he never seems to have a problem. A 3 year old son of a friend mine recently tried to change channels on their TV by swiping his hand across the screen. so all this gestural multitouch control system that kids are learning from phones, tablets, WIIs and kinex seems to be providing them with a universal and intuitive language for accessing technology.

 

the opacity of how its actually working is a bit of a worry though, i agree. but what gives me hope is that it has never been easier for kids to get into programming and technology hacking from an early age. the proliferation of the raspberry pi in classrooms is fantastic, and the open-source philosophy that underpins so much of the exciting technology that is emerging just wasn't even thought of when people were designing the remote controls and telephones that us older ones had to get our heads around.

[Eclogite]

Only change is constant.

 

Simples.

 

(For an explanation of the significance of simples see here: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=compare+the+meerkat&docid=4589572989059181&mid=0AD2E0F7B8620B7F8FF50AD2E0F7B8620B7F8FF5&view=detail&FORM=VIRE1)

[blamski]

Only change is constant.

 

Simples.

 

 

 

aha! but is it constant or punctuated?

[cal]

"Electronic devices ... have gone mad. It is not just your TV or your camera or your twenty-seven-button cell phone with its twenty-one different screen menus and its 124-page instruction manual. ... The act of buying nearly any electronic product has gone from the straightforward plug-and-play experience it used to be to a laborious, joy-killing experience in unpacking, reading, puzzling out, configuring, testing, cursing, reconfiguring, stopping altogether to call the customer support line, then calling again an hour or two later, until you finally get whatever it is you've bought operating in some tentative configuration that more or less does all the things you want it to do--at least until some error message causes the whole precarious assembly to crash and you have to start it all over again. ... "

It really sounds like he doesn't understand technology... the only thing I've ever had to configure was my router and my linux distro (upon first set-up). I'm not sure what it is he's doing that's creating such a problem for him.

 

There were comments made about kids (7 and 3 years old) being able to figure this stuff out naturally, monkey-see monkey-do, and I get that, but I don't get why people of older generations don't intuit controls as well as younger people. The older people are the ones coding the guis and interfaces, why are they coding things that don't make sense to them? I mean that facetiously of course, but still.

[Gregb]

I disagree as well. Just about everything is working out of the box, little configuration and plug and play. It's made troubleshooting a thing of the past.