My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented
them a house nearby.It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up
with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with
touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that
try too hard.And it’s terrible. What a regression.
Examples include: light switches that require a demo to use, a Miele dishwasher that requires the use of a companion phone app, a confusing-to-use TV (of course), inscrutable thermostats, and:
And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two
behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working
too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.Now look… I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to
conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply
can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can
set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it.
It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to
make things easy yet.
In this period of the computerization of everything, so many systems have lost the innate intuitiveness from their analog counterparts. Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t “interfaces” at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.
One of the mottos of the Perl programming language is that easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. That’s the ideal when designing anything. But the more important part is keeping easy things easy. A house full of old-fashioned analog light switches is better than a house full of smart switches that need a demo to use at all, even though with the old-fashioned switches, you can’t do hard things like turn off the lights remotely, or turn off every light in the house with one action. The smart switches might seem like an improvement because they make possible hard things that were previously impossible. Making possible the impossible is surely a win, right? But not necessarily. Making possible the heretofore impossible isn’t axiomatically a win. It’s a loss if it comes at the expense of keeping the easy things easy, consistent, reliable, and intuitive. Nothing exemplifies that more than the decline in user experience of watching TV, and attempting something as previously simple as flipping between two games on two different channels.
The guiding principle when creating computerized versions of analog systems ought to be “First, do no harm.” Everything should be as easy, obvious, reliable, and intuitive as in the old system. Only add to that what doesn’t introduce any regressions on those fronts.
Alas, that’s how how the world has proceeded.
