By the 1990s, user-friendliness had become so ubiquitous in
software development that even the fictional programmers in Douglas
Coupland's novel
Microserfs
named their two pet hamsters Look and
Feel. Although Coupland was confident his readers would get
the joke, not all system-building companies understand the
full implications of the terms.
Interface designers may be obsessed with how pretty their
creations look, but it is how users feel at the end of a task that
really determines how usable a device is, according to
human-computer interaction (HCI) guru Donald Norman.
As professor of computer science at Northwestern University,
Chicago, with a long history in computer and user interface design,
Norman believes it is the system powering iTunes behind the scenes
- not the iPod's circular touch-and-scroll interface - that makes
it so user-friendly.
Magnificent job
"What people miss about the
iPod is
that it's not about the device," he says. "Apple did a magnificent
job of the entire system, from licensing the music to the iTunes
website. People don't know it's an
SAP website - they think SAP is horrible and complicated and
don't know how to use it. They don't know what they're using with
iTunes. Then Apple makes it easy to connect the iPod to your
computer. It's easy to get to iTunes. There's all sorts of trade
marks and digital rights management on top of that, and it's all
invisible to the user."
Norman's background in psychology helps to explain his focus on
users' emotional state when they interact with technology. His
first degree was in engineering, but gained a doctorate in
psychology and forged his early career in that field.
The combination of psychology and engineering helped him find
the key to usability. "It's all about people," he says. "I find the
most important thing is the emotional state of the people when they
are finished."
Since branching out from psychology into HCI, Norman has written
many books, as well as founding usability consultancy firm the
Nielsen Norman Group with
Jakob
Nielsen
, a Danish expert in HCI who has worked
for Sun Microsystems and Bell Communications Research.
Norman praises Apple and Amazon for backing their website design
and device usability with applications and infrastructure to
support them and become an essential part of the user's overall
emotional relationship with the device or service.
"What people care about is that they want to get their job done
and feel happy when they're finished," he says. "On Amazon, when
you purchase, you get a variety of emails, you have a few hours
when you can cancel, it says here's where it is shipping from and
when it will arrive with you. I consider that more important than
'traditional' usability."
So it is not only an organisation's ability to design
applications or websites that matters, but also whether it can
create the supporting infrastructure to make the whole experience
useful and pleasant. This calls for breaking down departmental
boundaries and allowing multidisciplinary teams to consider the
user experience throughout the process, he says.
"The organisational structure of the company gets in the way.
You have the design team in one corner, the engineers and
programmers in another, marketing somewhere else. Then you might
have manufacturing, distribution and sales channels. All these
people dislike each other and fight with each other.
"The first step to getting a good product is nothing to do with
the product itself - it is to do with the organisational structure
of your company and the product team. Most companies recognise that
is where the problem is, but changing company culture is very
difficult."
Déjà vu
After about 30 years working in HCI, little is new to Norman. "I
have sense of déjà vu," he says. "Any time some comes out with a
brand new idea, it is at least 10 years old. Apple brought out
iPhone with touch screen, put two fingers on at once and stretch
the picture, and so on. Well, we were doing that at Apple 10 years
ago. Two-touch technology has been in the research lab for 15 to 20
years. It just takes a long time to get something into an effective
product."
Norman's latest book,
The Design of Future
Things
, describes the perils and promises of
future smart objects, and has a cautionary tale for designers
of such objects, many of which are already in use or
development.
But Norman still relies on old, trusted technologies. "Today I
have five computers, but my favourite device is still a notepad and
pen," he says. "But I think we're close to being able to replace
that with a computer."