mjvilardi

29 January 2007 - Last Sunday’s 60 Minutes had a feature on a highly successful company called “Geek Squad” that helps people set up, troubleshoot, or repair their computers, DVD players, high-def TV’s and other digital doodads. The piece spends more than a few minutes belaboring what is, by now, a pretty obvious point: consumer goods are getting too damn complicated to use. In a wicked economic gotcha, manufactures put cheap chips in their products as a differentiator to drive sales; but to keep the price point competitive, they skimp on the user interface, manuals, and customer support. So we buy stuff that looks smart and makes us feel dumb – we struggle to understand cryptic instructions filled with technical jargon and acronyms – and we end up waiting for an unintelligible overseas operator to suggest that we switch it on and off a few times.

The Culture of Software Development
When the same people who wrote the software or engineered the hardware are tasked with designing the user interface, it is almost always a disaster. In his seminal 1999 book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper decries the arrogance and insensitivity of many programmers, whose attitude is “Be kind to chips and cruel to users.” Accustomed to being revered for their arcane technical knowledge, they’re dismissive of anyone with suggestions on how to make their work user-friendly. Even when interaction designers are involved, it has traditionally been after the functionality has been locked in.

“The single most important process change we can make is to design our interactive products completely before any programming begins. The second most important change is to turn the reponsibility for design over to trained interaction designers.”

Concern for user experience has caught on lately, in large part due to the success of Apple’s intuitive iPod, and the fierce loyalty of its growing user base. But we’re still buying a lot of poorly thought-out crap, and I don’t just mean digital crap. “User delight” should be built into everything. But it’s not. And the rising tide of bad design is getting on my nerves…

So I’m starting a new blog category: The Museum of Bad Design. Every Monday I’ll feature a new exhibit of unusable dreck. Feel free to contribute candidates by offering them in a Comment… or drop a line to: museum(at)mjvilardi(dot)com