• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2551 0

my university made about their rather different system. In older days, business phones always had a button labeled “hold.” You could push the button and hang up the phone without losing the call on your line. Then you could talk to a colleague, or pick up another telephone call, or even pick up the call at another phone with the same telephone number. A light on the hold button indicated when the function was in use. It was an invaluable tool for business. Why didn’t the new phones at Basic Books or in my university have a hold function, if it is so essential? Well, they did, even the very instrument the woman was complaining about. But there was no easy way to discover the fact, nor to learn how to use it.

I was visiting the University of Michigan and I asked about the new system there. “Yech!” was the response, “and it doesn’t even have a hold function!” Here we go again. What is going on? The answer is simple: first, look at the instructions for hold. At the University of Michigan the phone company provided a little plate that fits over the keypad and reminds users of the functions and how to use them. I carefully unhooked one of the plates from the telephone and made a photocopy (figure 1.4). Can you understand how to use it? I can’t. There is a “call hold” operation, but it doesn’t make sense to me, not for the application that I just described.

1.4 Plate Mounted Over the Dial of the Telephones at the University of Michigan. These inadequate instructions are all that most users see. (The button labeled “TAP” at the lower right is used to transfer or pick up calls—it is pressed whenever the instruction plate says “TAP.” The light on the lower left comes on whenever the telephone rings.)

The telephone hold situation illustrates a number of different problems. One of them is simply poor instructions, especially a failure to relate the new functions to the similarly named functions that people already know about. Second, and more serious, is the lack of visibility of the operation of the system. The new telephones, for all their added sophistication, lack both the hold button and the flashing light of the old ones. The hold is signified by an arbitrary action: dialing an arbitrary sequence of digits (*8, or *99, or what have you: it varies from one phone system to another). Third, there is no visible outcome of the operation.

Devices in the home have developed some related problems: functions and more functions, controls and more controls. I do not think that simple home appliances—stoves, washing machines, audio and television sets—should look like Hollywood’s idea of a spaceship control room. They already do, much to the consternation of the consumer who, often as not, has lost (or cannot understand) the instruction manual, so—faced with the bewildering array of controls and displays—simply memorizes one or two fixed settings to approximate what is desired. The whole purpose of the design is lost.

In England I visited a home with a fancy new Italian washer-drier combination, with super-duper multi-symbol controls, all to do everything you ever wanted to do with the washing and drying of clothes. The husband (an engineering psychologist) said he refused to go near it. The wife (a physician) said she had simply memorized one setting and tried to ignore the rest.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to create that design. I read the instruction manual. That machine took into account everything about today’s wide variety of synthetic and natural fabrics. The designers worked hard; they really cared. But obviously they had never thought of trying it out, or of watching anyone use it.

If the design was so bad, if the controls were so unusable, why did the couple purchase it? If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.

The user needs help. Just the right things have to be visible: to indicate what parts operate and how, to indicate how the user is to interact with the device. Visibility indicates the mapping