Jim McClellan meets a man who wants to sweep away the concept of the home computer
Here’s a question to ponder: how many electric motors do you have in your house? Probably more than you realise. But you don’t think of them as electric motors. Instead, you just get on with using your food mixer or sewing machine.
Seventy years ago, when electric motors were first sold as household tools, you really knew you had one. You bought a variety of attachments in order to use your new motor to mix food or to sew clothes.
According to Donald Norman, design critic turned digital design consultant, there’s a lesson here about the way computers will develop. Now, we generally have one big computer in the house, which, thanks to various different programs, performs various tasks. In the future, computing power will spread to all our tools. We’ll have lots of different computers to do all sorts of different things.
It’s just that we won’t call them computers.
Norman’s meditation on the technological evolution appears in his new book, The Invisible Computer, a critique of the computer industry’s belief that people should change to fit their machines. The exact opposite is true, he suggests. Machines – in this case, computers – should be redesigned and re-conceptualised to fit more easily into ordinary people’s lives.
The 62-year-old author started out in academia, worked at Apple and Hewlett- Packard, then recently set up his own consultancy, the Nielsen Norman Group, with Jakob Nielsen, Sun’s former World Wide Web usability expert. He’s become one of the more eloquent critics of the computer business’s lack of user friendliness.
Because its development has been driven mainly by technologists, says Norman, the personal computer is a fearsomely complex machine that confuses most people.
The future really belongs to information appliances. In contrast to the all-purpose computer, information appliances will be simple, single-purpose devices. Big desktop PCs will become a kind of infrastructure on which these new appliances will depend. They will be designed so well that “the tool will become part of the task, feeling like a natural extension of the work, a natural extension of the person”.
One appliance that might be on the way, for example, is a “weather and traffic display” to be hung on the wall like a clock and hooked up to the Net to get regular weather updates.
Even if this would not fit that well in your life, The Invisible Computer is still a worthwhile read. Though the prose occasionally combines the worst elements of management book and academic theory, it’s packed with fascinating detail.
In the past few years, various companies have dabbled with the information appliance but some have dismissed the idea. Norman thinks them misguided. He says that plenty of small start-ups are working with his company on different information appliances.
At the other end of the scale, Microsoft is backing both sides of the argument. “On the one hand, they tell me I’m wrong, and say there’s a tendency to go towards general- purpose not special-purpose machines. On the other hand, they say, `Yes you’re right, the world of information appliances will come and so we offer to the world Windows CE.'”
Norman admits his ideas may be hard for the industry to accept. For one thing, he’s suggesting that engineers should listen to marketing men. He acknowledges with a laugh that this is easier said than done. “But engineers do need to change. They simply don’t understand that they really should no longer be in charge, that if we’re going to make things that fit people’s lives better, we need people who understand people’s lives.”
Engineers also need to pay attention to user experience and aesthetics. “They say aesthetics doesn’t affect how something works. But it does affect how we perceive how something works.”
A case in point might be the seductively curvy iMac, lusted after by the kind of people who usually dismiss computers as geek things. “The iMac is a brilliant piece of industrial design. It shows the power of a good design to capture people’s imaginations. People have fallen in love with the iMac. What they fail to recognise is that inside it’s the same computer as before. It has the same complexities and the same lack of stability. The appearance in this case is very deceiving.”
The iMac only follows Norman’s ideas halfway. It has the mainstream friendly design. But it lacks a floppy disk drive, because its technologists feel the floppy belongs in the past. Norman feels the iMac’s strengths and weaknesses are probably down to Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs. The iMac has a pleasing cohesion, says Norman, “in part because Steve Jobs could drive the project along and prevent any distraction.
“On the other hand, the same Steve Jobs would logically argue that a floppy disk was unnecessary and his logic makes all sorts of sense. But logic is quite irrelevant. What really matters is what people actually do and what people actually do is they depend upon floppies.”
There is an edge to his comments about Jobs. Before Jobs returned to Apple, Norman was vice-president of their Advanced Technology Group. Jobs closed the department so Norman went to Hewlett-Packard which was working on an information appliance: the Hewlett- Packard CapShare 910, a handheld device about to come out in the United States that can scan and e-mail documents or send them direct to a printer.
“This was in the works before I joined Hewlett-Packard and came out after I left. That gives an indication of how slowly things move there. In the month my company has been active, I’ve been involved in more new ideas and more products than in the entire year at Hewlett-Packard.”