Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [78]
There is yet another problem: the curse of individuality. Designers have to make an individual stamp, their mark, their signature. And if different companies manufacture the same type of item, each must do it differently to allow its product to be distinguished from others’. A mixed curse, individuality, for through the desire to be different come some of our best ideas and innovations. But in the world of sales, if a company were to make the perfect product, any other company would have to change it—which would make it worse—in order to promote its own innovation, to show that it was different. How can natural design work under these circumstances? It can’t.
Consider the telephone. The early telephone evolved slowly, over several generations. It once was a most awkward device, with handset and microphone, one held with each hand. You had to turn a crank to generate a signal that would ring the bell at the other end of the line. Voice transmission was poor. Over the years improvements were slowly made in size and shape, reliability, and features that simplified its use. The instrument was heavy and robust: drop it on the floor, and not only did it still work but you seldom lost the telephone connection. The layout of the dial or the push buttons resulted from careful experimentation in the laboratory. The size and spacing of the keys were carefully selected to work for a wide variety of the population, including the very young and the very old. The sounds of the telephone were also carefully designed to produce feedback. Push a button and you heard a tone in the earphone. Speak into the microphone, and a carefully determined percentage of your own voice was fed back into the earphone, the better to help you regulate how loudly you were talking. The clicks, buzzes, and other noises you heard while a connection was being established provided useful indications of progress.
All these minor aspects of the telephone were arrived at slowly, over years of development protected by the monopoly status of most national telephone systems. In today’s wildly competitive market, there is a fierce desire to bring out a product that appeals to a wide body of people and that is distinctive and different—the market demands speed and novelty. Many of the most useful refinements are being lost. Push buttons are apt to be arranged haphazardly, with the keys oversize or tiny. The sounds have been taken away. Many telephones don’t even give feedback when the buttons are pushed. All the folklore of design has been lost with the brash new engineers who can’t wait to add yet the latest electronic gimmickry to the telephone, whether needed or not.
One simple detail can make the point: the ridge of plastic next to the switch hook—the button under the receiver that, when depressed, hangs up the call. Ever knock the telephone off the table and onto the floor while you were talking? Wasn’t it nice when you didn’t get disconnected, frustrating when you did? The monopolistic Bell System designers explicitly recognized this problem and designed with it in mind. They made the telephone heavy and sturdy enough to withstand the fall. And they protected the critical button with a shield that prevents the switch hook from hitting the ground. Look carefully at figure 6.1: see that on the one telephone the buttons cannot reach the ground and so are not depressed. A small feature, but an important one. Economic pressures have made the newer telephones lighter, less expensive, and less sturdy—throwaway phones, they are often called. And the protective shield? Often as not,