I was quoted in the article because of my article arguing that simplicity is highly overrated: the tasks that we do require tools that match the requirements, and these add complexity. Moreover, we purchase on features, not on their absence, and so the successful business must always face this tradeoff: the very things that customers complain about afterwards are what caused them to [purchase the item in the first place.

Now, I have always admired 37signals. Nice website, intelligent articles. But I've tried their products and although they have admirable qualities, they have never quite met my needs: Close is not good enough. After reading the article, I understand why: the developers are arrogant and completely unsympathetic to the people who use their products.

Yes, they are arrogant -- and proud of it: "Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."

Park concludes his article by saying "Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. 'I'm not designing software for other people, 'Hansson says. 'I'm designing it for me.' "

“I’m not designing … for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes. Thank goodness most companies recognize that this attitude is deadly.

If 37signals wants to follow this attitude, I think that is fine. I'm pleased that they are enjoying themselves and that their simple applications do indeed meet many people's simple needs. But I would prefer someone who designed software for other people. If you want a hobby, fine, indulge yourself. If you are running a business, then the needs of your customers come first. This means understanding them, understanding the activities they do, designing for them. It does not mean throwing features together haphazardly. It does not mean doing everything customers request. It still means being disciplined, having a clear conceptual model of the product, and sticking to that model. But to ignore them, to say “I’m not designing .. for other people,” is an attitude that will not only lead to failure, it is one that deserves to fail.

Use Southwest Airlines as the model. When customers demanded reserved seating, inter-line baggage transfer, and food service, they refused (and only now, are reluctantly providing semi-reserved seating). Why? It is not because they ignore their customers. On the contrary, it is because they understood that their customers had a much more critical need. Southwest realized that what the customers really wanted was low fares and on-time service, and these other things would have interfered with those goals.

I once had a lively, entertaining dinner with Herbert Kelleher, Chairman and co-founder of Southwest Airlines. I asked him why they had ignored the requests of their customers. Herb looked me up and down sternly, sighed, took another sip of his drink, uttered a few obscenities, and patiently explained. His marketing people asked the wrong question. They should have asked, would you pay $100 more for inter-airline baggage transfers? $50 more for reserved seating? No, the customers wouldn't have. They valued on-time, low-cost flights, and that is what Southwest delivers.

Land the plane, push the people out as fast as you can, tidy up quickly, with everybody pitching in: cleaners, flight attendants, pilots, and rush the new people in. Don’t use assigned seating because in its absence, customers run into the airplane, hoping to grab a good seat fast. Minimize turn-around time and you need less airplanes, less crew, less expense. Add amenities and you slow down everything, requiring more airplanes, more cost. Why would you want to slow down the turnaround time when your entire business model is based upon low cost efficiency?

Understanding the true needs of customers is essential for business success. Making sure the product is elegant, functional and understandable is also essential. The disdain for customers shown by Hansson of 37signals is an arrogance bound to fail. As long as 37signals is a hobby, where programmers code for themselves, it may very well succeed as a small enterprise with its current size of 10 employees. I'm happy for them, and for the numerous small developers and small companies that find their products useful. But their attitude is a symbol: a symbol of eventual failure. Too bad. In fact, that attitude is not so much arrogance as it is selfishness: they are selfish. A little less arrogance and a lot more empathy would turn these brilliant programmers into a brilliant company, a brilliant success.

One correspondent wrote: " I think you're somewhat mistaken in your evaluation of 37signals. To them, feature-bloat in web applications is akin to food service and seat reservations for Southwest Airlines. Application simplicity and usability are what the customers need most."

I do not disagree with the comment: I simply do not believe that arrogance is the solution. Feature-bloat is horrible. 37signals is correct to be annoyed. But the disdain they show for their customers is not just arrogance: it is selfishness. The solution is not ignorance of the needs of your customers. Their approach is both arrogant and selfish.

The solution is to decide which customers represent your core audience, and then to observe them at work, the better to understand their true needs. (Not by asking them, not by questionnaires, not by focus groups). Rapid iterations of prototype and evaluation is the key. The iterative design method of rapid prototyping, test, and iteration (all done within the span of a day or so) is well defined in the Human-Computer Interaction community. It starts with observation and understanding. It then proceeds through rapid prototyping and test, continually refining the project scope and definitions.

The mark of the great designer is the ability to provide what people need without excessive complexity, without feature bloat. Simplicity should never be the goal. Follow the famous Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace.

Jane Black of the Washington Post did her homework well and wrote an engaging essay on new innovations in tableware. A Knork in the road: On the cutting edge, new designs aim to change the way we eat, one bite at a time. Not only that, she let me have the last word.

Jimmy Guterman, editorial director of O'Reilly's Radar group gave the article and our program a nice description and plug in his blog, with his item entitled Teaching design to businesspeople. Guterman concludes by saying this about our design track in the MBA + MEM degree program at Northwestern. "It's still early on, and Winograd's perspective in the article is prospective, but it's another data point that the next generation of businesspeople may be able to think at a deeper level than shades of mauve."

The Innovation article may require a subscription (either personal or by your library) for access, but I can email copies to anyone who requests it from me at norman at northwestern.edu.

An interview with Felix Knoke of Spiegel On-Line is now available (in German). Dateien-Wirrwarr, verwirrende Menüs, viel zu viele Fenster: Computer-Visionär Don Norman findet die Programme von heute unmenschlich und überkompliziert. Mit SPIEGEL ONLINE sprach er über die Zukunft des Computers - und dessen nahes Ende.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included.

Just as dirt collects in crevices, buffers collect in the interfaces between systems. It is their natural home, and life would not work without them. I have become fascinated by buffers. I see them everywhere I look. They cannot be escaped.

What is a buffer? It is a holding space between two systems, sometimes in space, sometimes in time, allowing the objects or information from one system to await the next system. The pages of this book are a buffer, holding thoughts and ideas as printed words, awaiting the time that a reader peruses them. Waiting rooms are buffers, as are memory systems, holding the information generated by one system until the next can make use of it.

Whenever two systems must interact, unless every event of one is perfectly synchronized with the events of the other, one system is going to have to wait. If the receiving system is ready first, it must delay, waiting for something to happen. If it is ready last, then if earlier arriving events are not to be lost, there must be a memory system to hold them. These memory systems have a variety of names depending upon the domain: memories, queues, buffers, inventory, waiting rooms, stock, and even books on a bookshelf (awaiting readers), food in the pantry (awaiting cooks and eaters), and any items that are stockpiled, awaiting use.

Problems arise at interface, any interface, be it person and machine, person and person, or organizational unit and organizational unit. Any place where two different entities interact is an interface, and this is where confusions arise, where conflicting assumptions are born and nourished, where synchronization difficulties proliferate as queues form and mismatched entities struggle to engage.

To the analyst, such as me, interfaces are where the fun lies. Interfaces between people, people and machines, machines and machines, people and organizations. Anytime one system or set of activities abuts another, there must be an interface. Interfaces are where problems arise, where miscommunications and conflicting assumptions collide. Mismatched anything: schedules, commuinication protocols, cultures, conventions, impedances, coding schemes, nomenclature, procedures. it is a designer's heaven and the practitioners hell. And it is where I prefer to be.

In the brain, queues manifest themselves as memory systems, holding information as it passes from one set of processing units to another. Memory systems must therefore reside at every interface, although they may not be recognized as such. Anything that maintains a trace over time is a memory system, so even the red mark on skin after a scratch is a memory system of sorts, even if the role it plays is non-functional. Inside the brain, however, visual and auditory short-term memory systems co-exist with short- and long-term memory systems. All perceptual systems must have memory structures, all motor control systems, all things that interact. If perception or thoughts take place at different levels of processing, then memory systems must handle the problems of synchronizing the events. Hence the proliferation of human memory systems, with new ones seemingly discovered every year: short term, working, semantic, procedural, declarative, implicit, explicit, and what-have you. There must be equivalents in the motor system, maintaining short and long-term memories of muscle actions, limb positions, and control signals.

In services, queues are lines of people waiting to be served, sometimes orderly, sometimes unruly, sometimes sitting patiently in waiting rooms. In the hospital, it is people in waiting rooms, patients staying in recovery rooms or intensive care wards beyond the time required while awaiting an empty room, or even patient in beds lined up in the halls. In the factory, queues are called inventory, sometimes neatly stacked in warehouses, sometimes piled up in front of machines or assembly line, waiting their turn. Each worker requires their own queue of parts and to the factory operations expert, queues -- inventory -- is something to be minimized, for any part in a queue is considered idle investment.

Buffer hunting is an engaging sport. You will find them all over, even in the most unexpected places. Once your mind has been tuned to the concept, you cannot escape them. In manufacturing operations, inventory is considered waste, and the modern trend toward “pull” systems and “lean manufacturing” is an attempt to eliminate, or at least reduce the cost of inventories, of material paid for but unused, stacked up in warehouses or factory floors awaiting its turn. The goal of pull systems is to minimize inventory, for as soon as a an item is used, it “pulls” the next one into the waiting area. It doesn’t take much thought to recognize that this is very difficult to pull off perfectly, but the philosophy allows dramatic reduction in inventory.

We can see buffers in operation almost everywhere. For example, when I walk into a dining room and see the food waiting to be dispersed to the guests, these are inventories of food, buffers. Even when eating from a plate heaped with food, the food not yet in the mouth is inventory, a buffer that makes it easy to select from the preferred orderings at the eater’s own pace.

I once experienced an inventory-less eating place: completely pull-driven. I was at an expensive Tempura restaurant in Japan, seated directly in front of the chef. The chef would ready a tempura piece of fish, vegetable, whatever, and carefully watch me. Each piece was made to order, fried and placed on my plate precisely when I was ready to lift it to my mouth. But even here, there were inventories: food already prepared and coated with tempura mix, hot oil awaiting the introduction of the next food morsel, a plate to hold the food, even if only for a few seconds, and, for that matter, an inventory of eaters, so that the eight of us sitting in front of the chef constituted an inventory of eaters, where the chef continually watched to see which diner was ready for the next mouthful. You can see why such a restaurant would have to be expensive.

Interaction design is about interfaces, which means it is about synchronizing the events of different systems, about memories, buffers, queues and waiting rooms. Waiting is an unavoidable component of interfaces, an unavoidable part of life.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Director of a dual-degree MBA plus Engineering program in Design and Operations at Northwestern University, a curriculum devoted to decreasing inventories and queues. His latest book is The Design of Future Things. He lives at www.jnd.org.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included.

It’s 6:30 in the morning. I’m with a group of surprisingly wide awake, cheery physicians and nurses, doing grand rounds on the pediatric ward of one of the best hospitals in the United States. I’m part of a study group for the National Academies, looking at the ways by which information technology is used in healthcare. This hospital is a leader: and I see computers everywhere.

I've been spending a lot of time in hospitals recently. No, not as a patient, as an observer — following doctors and nurses on their grand rounds, watching patients get admitted, nurses doing shift changes, pharmacists filling prescriptions, and then watching nurses actually deliver the prescribed medication to their patients, waving barcode readers over the prescriptions, the medication, and the patients.

We walk down the hall toward the first set of patients. We are quite a crowd: the attending physician and approximately five medical residents (physicians completing the last stage of their training), plus one or two nurses. The attending physician is responsible for the patients’ treatments and supervising the residents. Each of the residents is wheeling a computer cart in front of them. This hospital calls them “COWs”, for Computer On Wheels. (One hospital explained that they had switched the name to WOW, Workstation On Wheels, after a patient heard physicians conferring outside her room mention “the cow” and thought they were referring to her.) A COW is a chest-high cart, with computer screen and keyboard at a height appropriate for reading and typing for a standing person, with the computer itself and batteries located at the bottom of the unit.

Five COWs, plus a nurse wheeling a big filing cabinet of papers, plus the attending physician, plus the several members of my observation team. We took up a lot of space. We stopped at each patient’s doorway to review progress. The attending physician asked for a review and each of the residents would flip through the windows displayed on their computer screens and summarize the status: “potassium level fine, white count low.” Each resident had a different piece of the patient, or to be more precise, had screens that described the test results of different laboratories.

As a result, from the physician’s point of view, the patient was reduced to a bunch of numbers. Moreover, the numbers were not organized by symptoms or diagnoses: they were organized by what tests were run and which laboratory within the hospital had processed the results. The patient’s history — the record of past events and healthcare — was in a different location than current test results. Current results were in a different place than past results. Different hospitals might have different laboratories, so their results would be organized differently. But the attending and resident physicians and nurses were experts at piecing together a mental model of the state of the patient from all these numbers. Or so they said: evidence is difficult to come by.

“That’s interesting,” I thought to myself, stepping into a room filled with displays. There were multiple infusion pumps, multiple computer readouts, multiple monitors. The entire room was filled with the red glowing lights of display readouts and the dim light of graphs on computer screens. “Interesting,” I said aloud, “that you have brought these monitors into one place so you can see how all the patients are doing.”

“No,” said one of the physicians, “what do you mean?”

“So where are the patients?” I asked, expected to be told that they were in adjacent rooms to the instruments.

“Right there,” said the physician, obviously puzzled by my request. “Right there in the room, right in front of you.”

I looked closely and still couldn’t see a patient. One of the nurses walked over and pointed. “Oh,” I said.

There were so many medical devices, so many readouts and displays, that I could not even see the patient until someone walked over and pointed. Now this was an infant ward, so this particular patient was tiny, but even so this is a good illustration of modern medicine: From the point of view of the physicians, the patient is a set of test results and numerical readouts. The patient as a person tends to be forgotten.

I saw this later in a different hospital in yet another ward. The attending physician would stand outside of the patient’s door and listen to the review of the test results by all the residents. They would then discuss the results and make further recommendations. Then, as we all left to go to the next doorway and the next patient, the attending physician would knock on the open door, stick his head in and say, “How are you doing today, Mr. Forbes?” That was the extent of patient interaction.

So many numbers we lose sight of the person. Scientists measure what they can measure and pronounce the rest to be unimportant. But the most important parts of life are qualitative. One of the physicians on my study team told us that it can take as long as 20 minutes to fill out all the required forms while she is in front of the patient, yet she is only allowed 15 minutes to attend to each patient. She has to force herself to look at and interact with the real patient. One hospital center estimates that nurses only spend 1/3 of their time in direct care of a patient. Half of the remaining 2/3 of their time is spent on documentation and medication record keeping. One physician told of watching a nurse busily record all of the numerical indications about a patient’s circulatory and respiratory systems, but with insufficient time to think about the meaning of the numbers and insufficient time to look at the patient: a five-second glance would have sufficed to show that the patient was having extreme difficulty breathing.

Modern medicine is a complex undertaking. It is highly technical, highly specialized. The patient has been carved up into little kingdoms, with different specialties competing for ownership of each piece, leading to occasional flashes of territorial wars. Nowhere is this more vividly presented than in the operating room where a vertical sheet placed over the patient at the level of the neck divides the territory belonging to the anesthesiologist (the upper part of the patient — the head) from the territory belonging to the surgeon (the lower part of the patient – the body). But even where everything works as planned, with the patient receiving the best care possible from the myriad specialists who are called in for assistance, the complexity of the process and the multiple disciplines, the fetish for numbers and regulations, all conspire to make attention to the needs of the patient seem like an afterthought.

Those of us who have spent time in hospitals, whether as a patient, relative, or friend, know how frustrating it can be. All of us, friends, relatives, and even the patient, are pushed aside in the interests of efficient medical care. And even when there is a caring physician or nurse attempting to aid, well-intended but onerous privacy laws can block attempts of the patient and especially of relatives and friends to gain access to information.

The modern hospital is a complex system, with multiple complex interactions among people, equipment, laws, institutions, and a confusing wealth of information. It is time to turn our attention to the multiple interfaces and design issues within this complex system. Healthcare is a problem that needs immediate attention. We need to start now, for the issues are life-threatening.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Director of a dual-degree MBA plus Engineering program in Design and Operations at Northwestern University, and author, his latest book being The Design of Future Things. He lives at www.jnd.org.

Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine (N. Y. Times Science Section: December 18, 2007).

John Tierney's NY Times Blog 1: Scientific Breakthrough: How to wash your hands. (Photographs by me.)

John Tierney's NY Times Blog 2: Smart elevators, dumb people

A “Digital Cafe” interview with Mario Armstrong:

Interview on the Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Peter Merholz interview (54 minutes)

Core77 Interview with Bruce Thorp

Donald A. Norman, a psychologist and an industrial designer, argues in “The Design of Future Things,” his recently published book, that a new organism is emerging that he calls a “person+machine.”

“Machines have neither motives nor emotions,” he wrote recently in an e-mail message. “Still, machines, appliances and even services have personality traits, if only because they were designed to be conscientious or not, friendly or curt, smooth or abrupt, condescending or understanding, recalcitrant or forgiving.”

Autonomous machines of the future, he said, will increasingly have emotions for the same reason that people have them: to protect themselves as well as to make choices among competing demands for their attention as well as a mechanism for social cooperation.

A Problem Of Progress

Life is supposed to get easier with new technology. Donald Norman wishes it were really so. Instead, he says, as devices evolve, people wind up befuddled and annoyed. The culprit: bad design, a longtime target of the Northwestern University professor. In his seminal 1990 book, The Design of Everyday Things, Norman explained why, for example, people so often switch on the wrong burner of an oven range--in a person's mind, a straight row of control knobs doesn't logically map onto a square stove top.

In THE DESIGN OF FUTURE THINGS, he turns to technology on the cusp of invention--smart homes, cars that drive themselves--and finds big problems brewing. Making machines ever quieter may seem wise, for instance, but then they lack audible cues to help people know something is happening. Faced with silence, we often grow frustrated and start over. Better to use natural and intuitive signals. Consider vibrations in a car seat instead of yet another blinking light on the dash to let you know you're drifting across lanes. It's technology that gets psychology.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included.

One of my mentors, the distinguished American psychologist George Miller, once passed judgment on the contributions of a research scientist by stating "he has filled a much needed hole." The same judgment can be passed upon many products.

Much of our research, especially the ethnographic studies that watch people in their daily lives to find areas of potential support, aims to find unmet needs, to fill those necessary holes, those essential voids. Essential voids? Yes. Holes, gaps, and voids are essential to civilized life. They give us respite from the press of modern civilization, returning us to ourselves, with our own thoughts and our own resources. It is the space between things that allows us to be at peace with the world, to be in silence, to be undisturbed. Many things need to be done by people, by us. Doing gives a sense of accomplishment, of participation, of belonging, Doing, thinking, dreaming: all are needs best left unfilled by products and designs.

We need more unmet needs, not less. How many times do the never-ending ethnographic studies coupled with ever-eager design groups lead to unwanted, unnecessary, overburdening, and environmentally insensitive products? How many times are these unmet needs best left unmet? Why must we rush to fill the essential voids in our lives?

My comments were inspired by the remarks of John Thackara (2005, in van der Lugt & Stappers, 2006), commenting on a seminar on design research at the Delft University of Technology. Thackara worried about the frenzy to fill all those unmet needs. ”Why?” he wondered. I asked Pieter Jan Stappers, one of the seminar organizers, what he thought of the comments. Pieter Jan obviously approved:

Holes, the negative space, unstructured spaces, have always been important, especially in the areas of creative thinking, such as arts, design, science, and probably everyday life and religion. One danger in modern technology fitting closely into the patterns of people's lives, is that an efficiency drive takes over, with over-structuring as a result. (P. J. Stappers, email: 2007. Used with permission.)

Innovation is good, we are all told. Innovation is a growth industry, with books, seminars, and firms all devoted to promoting its virtues We teach our students – and our executives – to do field observations, to define and create, to brainstorm and innovate. Come up with the better idea and the world will rush to your door. We take existing products and tweak them, modify them. We add intelligence and features. The world of products grows ever more complex every year, every hour.

But most innovations fail. Most new products fail. What does that tell us about the unmet needs? Maybe most of them deserve to be unmet.

I fear that we have uncritically accepted a huge amount of baggage in our rush to turn human-centered design into a science. Personas sprout everywhere. Teams of ethnographers scour the land. Even marketers now claim to be doing ethnography instead of surveys and focus groups, although I fail to notice any difference in results. Everyone’s actions are being scrutinized, from office work to love making. As a result everything grows in complexity from kitchen toaster to the bathroom toilet.

Ethnographic research is fun. You get to go out into the world and watch, take pictures, satisfy your curiosity and inherent nosiness. Back at the office it is great fun to scribble notes, to post them on walls and rearrange them to form patterns. Then we can create personas, colorful little artificial people with cute, interesting lives, or maybe overstressed, over-busy lives. We delight at personas, at prototyping, at watching people go through their paces. New products galore. Innovation is the new hot topic. But does all of this activity lead to actual success in the marketplace? I fear not.

All across the world stores, catalogs, and internet shopping sites contain an endlessly proliferating choice of products. Do we need all of these things? Are they actually used? Or does every home have its own private cache of discarded gadgets, hidden away because they serve no useful function.

Designers take pride in innovation, but what percentage of new product innovations actually succeed in the market place? Estimates vary, but they range between 4 and 10%, depending upon which study you believe. In other words, 90 to 96% fail. That’s pretty miserable. It means that whatever we are doing, it isn’t the right thing.

Innovation is not a guarantee of success. Successful products must satisfy a large number of dimensions: form, function, value, design, marketing, production, distribution, sales and servicing. Successful products seldom stand alone, in isolation. Most are part of a strong product family that provides supportive infrastructure, where there is a solid platform that builds each individual product’s value and sustains it. Unmet needs? Essential voids? Let them be.

Lugt, R. v. d., & Stappers, P. J. (2006). Design and the growth of knowledge: Best practices and ingredients for successful design research. Delft, The Netherlands: Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/symposium/

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, and author, his latest book being The Design of Future Things. He lives at www.jnd.org.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. 

I write this from Driving Assessment 2007, a conference on automobile safety, held this year on the beautiful shores of the Columbia River in the state of Washington. Members of the HCI community would feel comfortable at this conference: issues of design, workload, distraction dominate.

A while ago I wrote a column for Interactions entitled “There’s an automobile in HCI’s future.” This conference reinforces the view: The problems of interface design are ever present in the automobile, but accompanied by new issues, especially that of safety.

New technologies are rapidly entering the automobile. New forms of automation interact with the driver (some don’t even bother to interact but simply take over), controlling speed, braking, lane-keeping, distance from the vehicle ahead, or behind, or to the sides, automatic parking. Automatic instructions, navigation, warnings, and suggestions. There is also an ever-increasing number of third-party add-ons, such as music players, video game players, cell phones, hand-held navigation systems, and computers. All this give rise to the potential for distraction and the danger of objects flying through the air during a collision. All together, there are major implications for safety. The HCI profession is used to dealing with confusion and frustration. Here is a situation where physical injury is involved. As one researcher at the conference commented, “What I really like about this area is that our research saves lives.”

All of our proud, graphically oriented screen devices, especially those with touch-sensitive screens and a paucity of physical controls, may be delightful to use while in a comfortable environment, but they become safety hazards when also attempting to drive a car. If the eyes of the driver are off road for two seconds, studies show a dramatic rise in accident rate. Try selecting a song or a cell contact or programming a street address into a navigation system in less than two seconds: impossible. Moreover, because the driver is attention switching, not only must the eyes shift from road to device, and back again, but all the context must be restored: memory structures, intentions, planned activities. Task switching lengthens the time to do each task considerably, thereby magnifying the danger. So here is a scientific question for which I do not know the answer. Suppose we have n tasks, T₁, T₂, … T_n. Now suppose we do all simultaneously, switching among them. How long does it take to do n tasks when switching between them? I am sure the answer is task-dependent, but I would not at all be surprised to discover that The time to do n tasks in this manner is between 2 and 10 times the sum of the times required to do the tasks separately, without switching. In other words, if in a pure, pristine laboratory test, someone can change a radio station or dial a phone number in T seconds, while on the road, while timesharing, this same task might take 2T to 10T seconds. Think of the added danger.

But, you may complain, people shouldn’t be programming navigation systems while driving, dialing telephone numbers, changing radio stations, or selecting which piece of music to listen to. Yes, that is logically true, but as usual, we must be guided by people’s real behavior, not by logic.

How can we design the devices people insist on using in the car so that they do not increase danger? How do we design the automatic warning systems for speed, distance from the car ahead, curve speeds, lane-straying, and all of the other safety features now being designed so that they are truly of assistance and not just a nagging, annoying set of sounds, buzzes, light flashes, and vibrations? There is an interesting design problem here: although accidents are common, they occur with very low frequency for any individual driver. Thus, although over a million people are killed every year in automobile accidents across the world, with tens of millions injured (World Health Organization), the chance that any individual will actually have an accident is remarkably low. So warnings of an impending accident, though of great importance, will almost always be a false alarm. 

If we could design a system so that there were no false alarms, then drivers would seldom receive warnings, and when one occurred, they might now know how to respond. But we know that false alarms cause people lose trust in the system. So we need a system in which the continual information about potential threats is considered reassuring and useful, so that when the situation is critical, the driver responds appropriately. Right now, engineers grapple with this problem: more behavioral scientists and HCI professionals need to be in on the act.

But before you rush off to join this important new area, be aware that it will feel like going back decades in the computer companies, when getting anyone to listen about usability was a full-time occupation. Research on automobile human factors and safety is picking up in research laboratories, but within the automobile companies, engineers rule. Human Factors professionals within the automobile companies complain that management doesn’t take them seriously. “How much data will they need” one researcher asked me, “before they can be convinced to add these safety features?” Ah yes, there is that old familiar refrain: us against them, those silly, uninformed, opinionated executives. Statements like this show the huge gulf between the view of the company as seen from management and the narrow, department-centered view seen at lower levels.

The automobile industry is badly in need of guidance on human factors. Excellent people already work in the companies, but they suffer the problems faced within the consumer electronics and computer industries over the past few decades. This is an important arena, one where human-centered design skills are essential. But success will come only when our discipline can provide seasoned managers who know how to work across disciplines, with engineers, designers (stylists), manufacturing, marketing and, of course, upper management. There should be an automobile in HCI’s future: but to make this happen presents a challenging problem in management, politics, and diplomacy.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, and author. His latest book, The Design of Future Things, deals with the problems of automation in the automobile and home.  He lives at www.jnd.org.

Disclaimer for this article: Norman serves on a Toyota advisory board, has a research contract from Ford, and has executive representatives from Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors his advisory board for the MMM (MBA + MEM) program at Northwestern.

Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2007. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included.

In a previous column I discussed the re-emergence of command line language. Once these were the ways we used our operating systems and applications. Now they are re-emerging within search engines. They are hidden, not easy to learn about, but I expect them to grow in power and, over time, become the dominant means of interaction.

In this column I talk of a second trend, one that also has much earlier origins: the return to physical controls and devices.  In the theoretical fields that  underlie our field, this is called embodiment: see Paul Dourish’s book “Where the Action Is.” But the trend is far more extensive than is covered by research on tangible objects, and somewhat different from the philosophical foundations implied by embodiment, so I use the term “physicality.”

Physicality: the return to physical devices, where we control things by physical body movement, by turning, moving, and manipulating appropriate mechanical devices;

We have evolved as physical creatures. We live in a complex, three-dimensional world filled with physical objects. We are analog beings in an artificial world of digital devices, devices that abstract what is powerful and good from the physical world and turn it into information spaces, usually in arbitrary ways. These new approaches put the body back into the picture. They require us to control through physical action, which means through mechanical devices, not electronic or graphic, through physical rather than virtual.

At one point, when digital circuits took over the control of such mundane objects as automobile radios, physical controls were removed. Ugh. The most recent advances in automobile radios and other audio equipment is to re-introduce knobs for tuning and loudness control. Even BMW in its attempt to replace all knobs, buttons and controls by a single control knob and complex menu hierarchy has been forced to bring back physical switches and knobs.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this trend is the Nintendo Wii game machine. Here, physical movement is the major method for interacting with its video games. The Wii has completely changed the game world: kudos to Nintendo! Tablet computers are slowly inching toward respectability, because the joy of being able to write and draw directly on a page or upon images is powerful, especially when coupled with a machine that also allows the more standard mouse-based pointing and typing inputs to work just as before: the result is the best of all worlds.

Physical devices have immediate design virtues, but they require new rules of engagement than we are used to with the typical mouse movements and clicks of the traditional keyboard and mouse interface. Designers have to learn how to translate the mechanical actions and directness into control of the task.

As we switch to tangible objects and physical controls, new principles of interaction have to be learned, old ones discarded. With the Wii, developers discovered that former methods didn’t always apply.  Thus, in traditional game hardware, when one wants an action to take place, the player pushes a button. With the Wii, the action depends upon the situation. To release a bowling ball, for example, one releases the button push. It makes sense when I write it, but I suspect the bowling game designers discovered this through trial and error, plus a flash of insight. Not all of the games for Wii have yet understood the new principles. This will provide fertile ground for researchers in HCI.

Physical devices, what a breakthrough! But wait a minute, isn’t this where the machine age started, with mechanical devices and controls?  Yup. Just as command line interfaces, now available in the quasi, natural language format now used within search engines, is also a throwback to earlier times but with improvements, so too is the return to physical controls a throwback to the earlier mechanical era, with improvements. It’s about time we returned to our roots, to something intended for people.

One interesting implication of the movement toward physical interfaces is that the dominant discipline for the technology of human interaction might also move from Computer Science back to Mechanical Engineering (which is really where it started many years ago). New disciplines will have to be learned, for example control theory and mechatronics. Mechatronics is the combination of mechanical engineering mechanisms with electronics (and computer science). Where does one learn mechatronics? CS departments shun the mechanical, so you won’t find it taught there. The social sciences shun the engineering, so you won’t find it there. Mechanical Engineering departments almost always teach it, but devoid of contact with human beings. Training in mechatronics is common in forward-looking design schools, because they know that the design of future things will include a hefty dose of intelligent mechanics and electronics, and in the best of design schools, consideration of the people for whom the designs are intended is always a prime consideration.

Part of the future of design is that of smart, intelligent devices, where almost everything will have a microprocessor built in, plus motors, actuators and a rich assortment of sensors, transducers, and communication devices. If the future is a return to mechanical systems, mechatronics is one of the key technological underpinnings of their operation. Mechatronics taught with an understanding of how people will interact with the resulting devices. Taught with an understanding of all the critical areas of design: mechanical, computer and electrical engineering; business, social sciences, business, and aesthetics. But where is one to gain skills in all of these areas? Within the university, each component is a separate discipline, sometimes not even on speaking terms with the others, a social separation that unfortunately can persist into the workplace. Not in the arts or sciences, for they are often dismissive of both applications and business. Similarly, business schools lack the emphasis on technology and aesthetics and, in far too many cases, on the social side. Design schools and departments have their own deficiencies, sometimes attempting to cover the entire gamut, but without the depth that comes from within the discipline. Fortunately, many individuals have put together the requisite skills. Time for our educational institutions to catch up.
 
Physicality: the return to mechanical controls, coupled with intelligent, embedded processors and communication. That is one path back to the future.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University where he co-directs the Segal Design Institute, and author of The Design of Future Things (Nov 2007). He lives at www.jnd.org.

The article does an excellent job of showing that good process is useful, but a strong leader, with good taste , an excellent eye for detail, and the strength to lead a team to focused, cohesive design makes all the difference between good design and great design.

The full chapter is Afterward: The Machine's Point of View, available here as a PDF.

(The excerpt is part of an ancient manuscript I uncovered, written some time in the 21st century, trying to teach machines patience in their interactions with people). Let me also recommend their Journal to you: light-hearted, but serious, with engaging articles and useful discussions on the many dimensions of design, mostly but not entirely product design.