 The
market usually sends
pretty clear signals about product design. Make it ugly, awkward, too
big, or
unintuitive to use, and the market will usually reject it. Simple,
small and
elegant does it. The telephone and the television couldn't be simpler
-- though some attempts to improve them (cell phones with hundreds of
esoteric functions, the videotape recorder, and most TV guides of both
the manual and electronic variety) have been horribly designed.
There's an enormous temptation to add features and functionality just
because it's possible, easy and inexpensive to do so. But it's a
mistake. If there's sophistication, it needs to be hidden under the
cover, like in Google search or the iPod. If you need a manual or 'user
training', it's too complicated. If the manual is bigger than the
product, well...you know.
Here
are some very useful technologies that have enormous promise but which
have not caught on because they violate these rules. If you're a
designer, or work with a company that has good designers, please see
what you can do about these -- the world needs simple, small/portable,
elegant versions of all of them:
- Videoconferencing:
I've talked to dozens of people about everything from webcams to
virtual reality videoconferencing systems, and the same words keep
coming up: "uncomfortable", "prone to embarrassing failures at the
worst times", "cumbersome", "need a techie on standby at all times",
"grainy and jerky", "not worth the effort". With the soaring cost of
travel, the plummeting cost of bandwidth, and the untapped opportunity
to connect loved ones across the globe, videoconferencing has to be
poised to explode -- if the design failures can be solved. And don't
tell me video is just too much of a bandwidth hog to ever reach 'is it
live or is it Memorex' quality -- if I can download a near-DVD quality
movie in not much longer than it takes to view it, quality should not
be an issue.
- Voice Recognition: Three
times I've tried to 'train' newer generations of voice recognition
software to understand my dictation, and each time I've given up in
frustration. There has to be a better way. Why couldn't the software
train me by chatting with me? It could tell me to repeat various words
and phonemes while I was working on other tasks, and ask me questions
whenever I typed a word it hadn't heard me say. It could even do some
some background searches and lookups for me, following standing orders
or inferring what I might find useful from what I was looking at. And
through 'conversations' with me, it could really learn how I talk, how
I pronounce, to the point that, by also studying my writing, it could
probably transcribe my dictation with better accuracy than I could type
my thoughts. The technology exists to do all this. All it takes it some
ingenuity, and some good design. And within a few years, we could get
rid of the world's most anachronistic tool, the keyboard, forever.
- 3D Display Video Eyewear:
With the keyboard gone through better voice recognition, the next
encumbrance to do away with is the monitor. You can already buy units
like that shown above from Icuiti,
and it's comparable in price to monitors, but the people I've talked to
say they wouldn't be caught dead wearing anything so geeky (and they
also fear damage to their health or eyes from extended use). But the
people I know who have tried them, as a replacement for a computer
monitor, DVD player or game monitor are just blown away by the 3D and
the surround-video virtual reality effect. If we can get reliable voice
recognition, light, tiny high-resolution video eyewear, and
wireless-anywhere high-speed Internet connections, we can do away with
the keyboard, the monitor and the hard drive of our PCs without losing
any functionality. So we could stop carrying around laptops and
lower-functionality substitute personal electronic devices like cell
phones and PDAs. What's holding us back?
- Music and Video Composers:
With weblogs, anyone can be an author and publisher. Technology readily
available today also allows us to be music composers, radio
broadcasters and film-makers. It's been around for a generation, but
the software to do this remains complicated and almost impenetrable to
anyone who isn't a studio engineer or experienced videographer. But
after all, it's not much different from composing text -- you have a
bunch of channels and you compose sound or video, record it in a
channel, and then edit it all together into a coherent production. So
why does the software have to be so damned complicated? It doesn't.
Maybe the popularity of podcasting will force the software designers to
rethink how we compose sound and video, and make it as simple as it
could be.
There is absolutely no reason why I can't be
walking around the block dictating my blog post for tomorrow and having
the software suggest changes and tell me when it's in doubt about
spelling, and then videoconferencing with Jon in Vancouver about it
using my video eyewear, and recording a video podcast based on our
discussions to attach to my blog post.
"If only it were that easy". |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
