An Apple for the Teacher
The Economist had a leader this week about lessons that can be learned from Apple.
One of them in particular rang true for me:
“Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity and ease of use.”
While many in the tech industry give lip service to “usability” too few put it into practice. And us users, who have few means to push back on bad design, end up having to find “workarounds” to clunky tools.
Case in point:
For reasons unknown to us, our home computer has stopped shutting down Windows XP gracefully. Oh, it says it is shutting down. It even gets to a black screen of offness. Then, suddenly, it springs to life again. Why is it doing this? Apparently, somewhere along the line of all the shutdown processes it has found something it can’t deal with. It won’t tell us what that is so we can fix it. Instead, it decides, I’ll just ignore that and keep going.
To shut down our computer, we wait until the black screen of offness and then a split second before life returns, we hit the off switch on the back of the machine (something that requires a certain amount of flexibility, you understand), count to five, and then switch it on again.
Wouldn’t it be easier if we could get an error message that told us something valuable like what was wrong and what we can do to correct the problem?
At a software company where I used to work, if a known issue had a workaround available, it was considered a low priority for fixing. I suspect this attitude is not unique to that company.
Why does the user end up being the one who has to be more creative than the engineer?