inputs/outputs

A lot of manuals are completely useless. Here are a few pitfalls:

1. the manual is a scrapbook of interesting stick figures and parts that must have been left out from your package
2. the manual is actually 5 or 6 manuals that all contain different information and distinguishing them isn’t possible at a quick glance
3. the manual contains completely useless information about the product
4. the most common: shoved into a drawer for “later” use
5. a combo of two or more of the above

I’ve explained before that I am everybody’s favorite technology guy when it comes to my friends and family. My dad had asked me for help with setting up his car to receive the bluetooth signal from his Razr. We sat there for a while, flipping through the manual, trying to find any shred of evidence about the bluetooth settings. We tried almost every menu in the car’s interface. We found buttons that would search for bluetooth devices, but none that would actually find the devices, or try to pair them at least.

I finally asked if there were extra manuals included with the car, and my dad pulled out a stack of them, one of them displaying a picture of a London phone booth. The instructions in the pamphlet led us through the process perfectly.

So I started thinking. Is it more important to have a solid UI or a helpful manual? Should we not hold it against the UI if we have to peek inside the manual? I came to a conclusion.

It’s not up to the designer to decide whether or not the UI is any good. The UI should have been at least somewhat easy to use and in the event that it hadn’t been, the purpose of the additional pamphlet should have been crystal clear. For instance, “Bluetooth Set Up” should have been written on the cover in very large letters instead of the very ambiguous phone booth photo ( a photo which could imply many different things). Easy as that. BMW still could have maintained a sense of style if they wanted to use a stock photo of a phone booth, as long as the purpose of the document was easy to identify.

Food for thought: the iPhone has been praised for its stellar UI, but its manual is the first hit when you google the word “manual.”

I went to Giant last night to buy some ingredients for my famous Orzo-Asparagus-Mushroom-Shrimp concoction, and I noticed something interesting. Most of the aisles in my local Giant food store were self-checkout. Only a few years ago, it was the special aisle for the tech savvy people who wanted to speed through checkout, while most people cowered in fear, running to their Giant employee to charge and bag their goods.

Now, most of us are weighing our vegetables, scanning items, and having the attendants bag our stuff and put them in a cart for us. Less interaction, more efficient. It makes the world seem like a colder place, now that technology is becoming smarter and taking the place of warm human blood. But the typical user, in this case, probably doesn’t care too much.

Grocery shopping can be an intimate experience. Any on-lookers are given a look into your homelife: what you are feeding your kids, what medicines you take, your habits, the magazines you read, and how much you spend on these items. Computers don’t judge.

The other side of the coin is that as simple as the system is, it still ends up being a problem for the users. Almost every time I’m in a self-checkout store, I see a “call for help” bulb light up on my station, or on someone else’s station. Or I have to remove something to re-weigh, or the belt sends it back.

Either way, incompetent users aren’t going to stop grocery stores from saving money with self-checkout registers. Once you get used to it, the whole process is really quite fast. Especially since you’re the one doing it, and it’s a chore that needs to be over as quickly as possible. There are some things that are much more intuitive than they appear to be - technology is can be one of those things. I mean, we all know how to use an ATM, right?

The Second System Effect is a theory from Frederick Brooks’ book The Mythical Man Month, a collection of essays about software design. He basically explains that a first system will inevitably fail, and that designers must keep that in mind. It almost seems pointless, then, to even build a first system. The catch is that you can’t have a second without a first.

The Regal Center, a shopping center in my hometown, has grown slowly over the past few years, with gigantic parking lot and a few auxilary stores next to the theater, so that people could grab a bite before a movie. Over the next few years, the center installed a Potbelly, and that restaurant soon became more than the pre-show bite. Pretty soon, it was a high school hangout, a concert venue, and a place to grab a really nifty/innovative sandwich. Other shops opened nearby, like Ben & Jerry’s, another store which is more than your run-of-the-mill ice cream vendor.

The parking lot overflowed, and all of the other parking lots nearby were off-limits for whatever reason. They installed a booth and a $1 fee to park, but the lot was still constantly full during peak hours. The booth was also awkwardly placed, and the cars have to snake around it, dodging the make-shift lane they had created with orange cones. It was pretty clear that adding anymore stores to this area would cause major problems with the traffic, especially since there’s a major route adjacent to the center.

Recently, a new center has opened directly behind the Regal center, and it is beautiful. Instead of one sidewalk, they’ve created a pavilion. There are multiple parking garages, and there are lights over every space that change color to indicate if the spot is occupied or not. The parking is free. There are restaurants that are a tad bit expensive. Well they’re more expensive than Potbelly, anyway.

There may not be a movie theater in this lot, or a nifty shop like Potbelly, but the user interface is a lot more elegant than the one of the center directly in front of it. That’s enough for me to ditch the Regal Center on a Friday night, even if I do love Potbelly’s award winning sandwich, “The Wreck.” A good user interface is enough, a lot of the time, to make consumers feel comfortable with paying a premium. It’s why we pay more for iPods/iPhones, Tablet PCs, etc.

Imagine the potential of a bunch of second systems that haven’t been invented yet: highways, tollbooths, plumbing, vending machines, medicine…