Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [107]
STANDARDIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY
If we examine the history of advances in all technological fields, we see that some improvements naturally come through technology, others come through standardization. The early history of the automobile is a good example. The first cars were very difficult to operate. They required strength and skill beyond the abilities of many. Some problems were solved through automation: the choke, the spark advance, and the starter engine.
Arbitrary aspects of cars and driving had to be standardized:
• Which side of the road people drove on
• Which side of the car the driver sat on
• Where the essential components were: steering wheel, brake, clutch pedal, and accelerator (in some early cars it was on a hand lever)
Standardization is simply another aspect of cultural constraints. With standardization, once you have learned to drive one car, you feel justifiably confident that you can drive any car, any place in the world.
Today’s computers are still poorly designed, at least from the user’s point of view. But one problem is simply that the technology is still very primitive—like the 1906 auto—and there is no standardization. Standardization is the solution of last resort, an admission that we cannot solve the problems in any other way. So we must at least all agree to a common solution. When we have standardization of our keyboard layouts, our input and output formats, our operating systems, our text editors and word processors, and the basic means of operating any program, then suddenly we will have a major breakthrough in usability.4
THE TIMING OF STANDARDIZATION
Standardize and you simplify lives: everyone learns the system only once. But don’t standardize too soon; you may be locked into a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing. Standardize too late and there may already be so many ways of doing the task that no international standard can be agreed on; if there is agreement on an old-fashioned technology, it may be too expensive to change. The metric system is a good example: it is a far simpler and more usable scheme for representing distance, weight, volume, and temperature than the older, British system (feet, pounds, seconds, degrees on the Fahrenheit scale). But industrial nations with a heavy commitment to the old measurement standards claim they cannot afford the massive costs and confusion of conversion. So we are stuck with two standards, at least for a few more decades.
Would you consider changing how we specify time? The current system is arbitrary. The day is divided into twenty-four rather arbitrary units—hours. But we tell time in units of twelve, not twenty-four, so there have to be two cycles of twelve hours each, plus the special convention of A.M. and P.M. so we know which cycle we are talking about. Then we divide each hour into sixty minutes and each minute into sixty seconds. What if we switched to metric divisions: seconds divided into tenths, milliseconds, and microseconds? We would have days, millidays, and microdays. There would have to be a new hour, minute, and second: call them the newhour, the newminute, and the newsecond. It would be easy: ten newhours to the day, one hundred newminutes to the newhour, one hundred newseconds to the newminute.
Each newhour would last exactly 2.4 times an old hour: 144 old minutes. So the old one-hour period of the schoolroom or television program would be replaced with a half-newhour period-only 20 percent