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There is a classic technology topic that has been assayed at one time or another by just about everyone, from New York literary bigwigs to local gardening columnists in Kansas: why can't I get my (fill-in-the-blank) to work the way it's supposed to? It can be played as amused, indignant, self-deprecating, or merely bemused. Everyone does it, most recently domesticated rocker Ozzy Osbourne, who on the debut episode of his new MTV series was obscenely befuddled by the remote control for his home entertainment system.
This column won't retread that ground--although, it must be said, that having just endured the trauma of upgrading a laptop operating system, I have a story or two I could tell. Instead, it made me wonder: why do designers of digital hard--and software have so much trouble with the simple notion that easy-to-use means easy to use. In other words, if you have to tell me why something is easy to use, after I've failed to make it work, it's already too late--it's like explaining a joke. You can do it, but what's the point?
I've long had a theory about this state of affairs, which I call the guru effect. Gurus, of course, are those technology-adept individuals in your company, your work group, your family, whom you call in when all else fails. If the printer won't print no matter what you try, call the guru. And God bless gurus--we wouldn't have gotten where we are today without them. In certain environments, in fact, I'm sometimes considered a guru--which I hope gives me license for commentary that might be perceived as a tad critical.
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My first inkling of the guru effect on ease-of-use came years ago, when I was writing a Newsweek story about computers in small business. I was interviewing a boss whose assistant was typing into a personal computer nearby. Midway through the interview she looked up and announced that her computer had crashed, and she needed to call "Lee" to reboot it. It was an Apple II--this was a long time ago--and I said, well, that's not hard to reboot, let me do it for you. No, she said, only Lee can get this machine to start.
OK, I said, and watched as Lee came into the room, sat down in front of the Apple II, lifted the lid and reached in to fiddle with something inside. He closed the lid, rebooted the computer successfully, then reached inside again to make another mysterious adjustment. About then he saw me watching, and it was clear I knew something about computers--including the fact that you didn't have to reach into the circuit boards of an Apple II to reboot it. "Oh, well," Lee said defensively, "that's just a little tweak I put in to improve the performance."
No: that was a little tweak that Lee put in to make Lee indispensable. And that's the danger in letting our gurus decide what constitutes easy-to-use: if they do too good a job of it, they may put themselves out of business. Ease of use needs to be judged by the person most likely to be befuddled--not by the experts.
The reason this is so important now is that the whole heritage of digital complexity is rapidly creeping into all consumer electronics--just ask Ozzy Osbourne. It's reminiscent of what happened when Steve Jobs, back in 1984, introduced the Macintosh by saying that we were going to make the personal computer as easy to use as the telephone. What we've done instead over the past fifteen years is make the telephone harder to use--how many people do you know who can successfully transfer a call on their latest digital office telephone?
Sure, there are some signs of progress in the personal computer world. The new Macintosh software for handling digital audio, video and photos is impressively simple--though you're out of luck unless you have the very latest Apple operating system and hardware. And the XP version of the notoriously intractable Windows has, along with its warm and friendly graphics, some real ease-of-use advances.
But Windows was introduced in 1985! If this is how long it takes to build easy-to-use technology, we have some major problems ahead. The long-promised digital convergence of computers, telephones and televisions is now well underway, and what has become clear is that it's not going to result in one single kind of hybrid mega-device. It's more like one of those disequilibrium points in evolution, when you suddenly have countless mutations, variations and Darwinian experiments running around, most of them evolutionary dead-ends. That's what the digital landscape is going to look like for the next decade--phones that act like tiny computers, computers that act like videophones, televisions that browse the Web, and every conceivable permutation in between.
If history repeats itself, nobody is going to able to figure out how to make those devices work either. And that, I guess, is good news for the next generation of gurus--as well as kind of a guaranteed-employment act for technology journalists. We're going to be able to write "Why can't I get my (fill-in-the-blank) to work?" columns for years to come. Perhaps that's even reassuring: no matter how quickly technology moves, some things just don't change.
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