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Homepage / Publications & Opinion / Archive / Daily Telegraph: Harddrive Why make interfaces so convoluted? Spending more money ought to be rewarded by simplicity but Peter Cochrane is muted by bells and whistles. You visit a music store, return home, and insert a newly purchased CD into a dumb box - your hi-fi. You press the play button and get instant music; why should it be any other way? The next day, however, you visit a computer store. Returning home, you insert your newly purchased CD into a really smart box - your PC. Many mouse clicks later, you may still be struggling to get at the information on the CD. Why is something so simple made so difficult? Why do we have to ensure we have the right version for an operating system, and anything between 4Mb and 16Mb of RAM for essentially the same information? I can buy a cheap camera with a modest level of integrated automation, including exposure, aperture and focusing. All I do is point and press to get good pictures. Alternatively, I can buy an expensive, top-of-the-range camera to find a level of operational difficulty that beggars belief. The same seems to be true of cars, television, hi-fi, and much more of our technology. Whatever happened to the old engineering principle of KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid? Why are we confounding ourselves with unnecessary complexity? Why make interfaces so convoluted and painful? Spending more money ought to be rewarded by more simplicity, not more complexity. In the past year I have purchased a large number of CDs from a diverse range of electronic publishing houses. Again, the curious inverse law of price and complexity emerges. The cheaper the CD, the easier and more user-friendly the interface. This spans the sublime to the ridiculous - from insert the CD and double-click on the icon, through to read these instructions, load the installer, and a nightmare of adjustments and complexity. I also seem to spend a lot of time weeding out multiple copies of Movie Player, Simple Text and a growing variety of applications necessary to support every CD I buy. Is it too much to ask for the illusion of simplicity? Remember when turning the volume up or down was just a twist of a knob instead of three or more clicks of a mouse? Get inside a CD, or a Web site, and we are presented with an infinity of variants that detract from their purpose and our ability to concentrate and navigate successfully. Again, it appears that the more money people have to spend, the more complexity they get. More graphics, bells and whistles seems to be the rule. When I'm looking for information, when I'm trying to work, I don't want an adventure travelling slowly through some interactive theme park. I want to get to information and understanding fast. Hyper-media and hyper-technology present us with a major challenge. Humans are not generally hyperspace thinkers. Most of us are outstanding in 2D, pretty good in 3D, poor in 4D, and definitely in trouble in 5D and above. Yet most information technology starts with at least 4D - or at least four degrees of freedom. A simple car music system now has LW, MW, FM, Tape, CD, RDS, TA, TP, MESSAGE, FFWD, Scan, Search, Memory. Web sites and CDs have time lines, technology themes, historical perspectives, simulations, movies, text, narration, text to speech, hidden doors, and more. In our physical world, we walk from 3D room to 3D room and cope. Going from 5D to 5D seems a tall and unnatural order. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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