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The human touch
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14/03/2008
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A US design guru says that too few products take account of user needs. Tom Shelley reports
“Designing for people is hard”, declares Don Norman, Breed professor of design at Northwestern University in the US.
Once vice president of advanced technology with Apple and a partner in Nielsen Norman Group, which advises various major US companies, Norman is passionate about what is wrong with many products that people are supposed to make use of – and what needs to be done to remedy that.
His battlecry to designers is to “think people” and “make it usable”. When he spoke at SolidWorks World earlier this year, his frustration was all too clear. One major bugbear is doors with handles that display signs saying ‘Push’. The sensible response, argues Norman, is to replace the handles with push plates and do away with the signs – which most people don’t read anyway until they find the door won’t open. And as for salt and pepper shakers – why stick labels on them when anyone can see what’s inside them?
In the industrial domain, he cites examples of machine tools where the only way to read everything on CNC controls is to lean dangerously into working areas.
“When you see posted labels, you know you are in trouble,” he laments.
But it is his ideas on the design of future products to which designers should pay particular attention, with much of his thinking set out in his book, ‘The design of future things’.
“Technology will not set us free,” he warns. “It will never solve all the problems of humankind. Moreover, for all the problems that are solved, new ones will arise. I believe that the new technologies will mainly befuddle and confuse, frustrate and annoy us, even while delivering some of the promised benefits. After deployment, technologies always deliver benefits never contemplated by their designers and developers, along with problems and difficulties never conceived of.”
He does not foresee houses full of mobile robots – as conceived in science fiction – but he does believe that, when it comes to interactive environments like virtual reality caves, “it’s going to be in the home” – as is 3D printing of toys, games, objets d’art, and even replacement crockery.
He is critical about the future development of cars, which he says “do not yet have the intelligence of a horse”. And he is loud in his demands for something to be done to reduce the 43,000 deaths and six million injuries resulting from road accidents in the US last year. And he is adamant that more highly automated car systems are not the answer, because of fundamental problems in communication between people and machines - and the fact that machines have real difficulties knowing the context in which they happen to be. “Machines that try to infer the motives of people, that try to second guess their actions, are apt to be unsettling at best, and in the worst case, dangerous,” is his take.
Rather than letting automated car systems take over even more responsibility for running things, insulating drivers from the environment in which they are driving, Norman suggests an alternative. “We could do a better job of coupling the driver to the situation in a natural manner. We need to bring back the truthful depiction of the danger.”
And while he praises ideas such stick shakers on aeroplanes to warn pilots they are getting close to stall conditions, he has no clear recommendation on how such concepts might best be applied to cars.
He is scathing about most of the ideas relating to ‘Smart homes’ that try to anticipate what their occupants want, preferring ideas that, in his words, “augment human intelligence” rather than simply “automate” – which take decisions away from people.
One notion he favours is the augmented note device, devised by Microsoft Research at Cambridge, which replaces notes secured by magnets on a refrigerator with a computer note pad – allowing messages to be added from anywhere through email, text messages or hand writing on the screen with a stylus. He says this makes people smarter by providing them with the tools they need – “but still letting them decide if, when and how to make use of this assistance”.
Whatever products do come to market, Norman sees many barriers that designers and engineers have to overcome to produce the next generation of successful products.
“Product design starts with observation,” he states. “The hardest part is asking the right questions. Most engineers don’t understand people. Engineers are specialists. Industrial designers are generalists. The two need to work together. By the way, it’s hard. Engineers are logical, sensible. Logical is not a natural way of thinking. The Greeks invented it. People are not logical. You have to design for the way they are.”
Pointers
* Don Norman has a hatred of ‘signs’, which he says people tend not to read – and should not be expected to
* He argues for technologies that ‘augment’ what humans do, rather than those that ‘automate’ – and try to make decisions for them
* He is particularly concerned about developments in car design that take decisions away from drivers, so they become ‘insulated’ from the road. Drivers need a true impression of danger, he warns
* Designing the next generation of technological products is going to be difficult, He accepts, not least because human beings are not logical and most engineers do not appreciate this
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Author
Tom Shelley
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