What can CIOs learn from the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar? Quite a lot, says Kim Vicente, author of a new book, The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology (Routledge, 2004). According to Vicente, the Strat is an example of technology designed with the user clearly in mind. By contrast, he says, much of our technology is not only too complicated, but dangerous as well. Vicente, a professor of engineering at the University of Toronto, was Hunsaker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT in 2002-2003 and a recent recipient of a McLean Genius Award. He has consulted for organizations including Microsoft, NASA, and Nortel. Vicente spoke recently with contributing editor Peter Krass from his office in Toronto.
Q: Is technology out of control? Is it really a threat to our quality of life? Isn't technology developed to improve quality of life?
A: That's the irony. We're in charge of technology; it doesn't design itself. Yet when you look at the statistics in a number of areas, you see a number of threats to our quality of life. My message is not anti-technology, but rather how technology can best be used to address the problems that we see in society. Whether it's in hospitals, airplanes, or nuclear-power plants, there are significant problems that affect all of us. There's a lot of room for improvement.
Q: How has technology run amuck? And why is voicemail so difficult to use?
A: One reason is that technology overrides ease of use. Another is that the motivation is on the organizational side, rather than the customer side. A technology like voicemail makes things easier for the organization, but sometimes makes life more difficult for the consumer. There's an enormous, untouched market out there for things that are simple and streamlined. For example, if someone could sell a VCR with just four buttons, I'd buy it. Meanwhile, what we see is the opposite. I saw a commercial the other day for a car, and the voice-over bragged that there were so many features on this car, it would take a 14-minute-long commercial to explain them all. Presumably, someone thought that would be attractive. But for a lot of people, that's scary and overwhelming. So I'm really talking about the need for a mind shift. We need a process to make that connection, that bridge. We can't leave it just to the wizards, as I call them. It's not that they don't try hard. It's just that it's too difficult a challenge to make that bridge by yourself.
Q: You talk about a shift, but from what kind of thinking?
A: People often develop technology for its own sake. It's an answer looking for a problem. Sometimes they develop things that are technologically sophisticated, that have all the bells and whistles, but that people either don't need or actually aren't capable of using. So people drown in the complexity and the pace of change of technology. Instead, we need to put people first.
Q: What role does specialization play in the creation of hard-to-use technology? You write about "silos of expertise"—is that part of the problem?
A: For people who have come up through science or engineering, all kinds of things are obvious to them. It's very difficult for them-unless certain design processes are in place-to imagine what it's like to be someone who doesn't have all that technical expertise. But most of the people for whom these products are designed don't have all that technical and scientific expertise. Consider a nurse in an operating room. People don't go into nursing to program computers. They go into it to take care of patients. Yet in the operating rooms, they face overwhelmingly complicated technology.
Q: Is this why so much computer software is difficult for nonprogrammers to use?
A: That's one reason. There are other reasons, as well. Software is a remarkable technical achievement. But too often, faced with a design project, programmers want to deploy their expertise. So they think of another feature they can implement: "Hey, someone might need that." So we get feature creep. It takes remarkable restraint to back off and say, "I'm not going to keep adding stuff that actually might make things too complex for people—even though that's what I'm trained to do."
Q: It seems there's a balancing act between making software feature-rich on one hand, and making it usable on the other.
A: Absolutely. The key is knowing who you're designing for. If you're designing a computer-aided design package for someone who's technologically sophisticated, you can assume all kinds of technical capabilities on the part of the user and make it much more sophisticated. But if you're designing something for, say, an operating-room nurse who doesn't have a lot of computer experience, then you might have to draw the trade-off line in a much more modest way.
Q: What about software-usability testing?
A: I may not use the term, but that's what I mean when I talk about things like the Palm Pilot and the Fender Stratocaster. Back in the 1950s, Fender took a different approach than many other guitar manufacturers, and the Strat has become a classic. Part of the reason is that the company involved musicians right from the start. It built prototypes. It had them tested. It still does. It pays a lot of attention to its customers. When you look at the guitar, you think it's all artistic, intuitive. But it's not. There's something very systematic behind that design process that contributed to the instrument's ease of use. The original Palm Pilot is another great example. Other companies were trying to cram as much stuff as they could into one device, thinking that was what people wanted or what they'd buy. But most people want to get on with their lives. Engineers are technological—they like solving problems, and they have a fascination with these things. But most people aren't like that.
Q: In your book, you describe several clever technological solutions to common problems, such as a PC that tells you when it's wasting electricity or a copier that saves paper by giving you a WYSIWYG view of the printout before it prints. Why don't more of these ideas make it to reality?
A: A paradigm shift is required. People think the answer is to add more features or to automate to remove human involvement, to treat people as if they're stupid and say, "Oh, the problem is human error. People are idiots, so we have to make it idiot-proof." The solutions I describe actually take a different perspective. Instead of treating people as idiots and automating as much as possible, those solutions assume that people are actually capable of remarkable things, given the right set of conditions. The designers looked at what people are good at, and they designed to fit that human factor. The photocopier solution, for example, is like a print preview. The designers found that if you give people feedback before they press the button, they're good at detecting whether the image is what they want. It's a whole different orientation. Again, technologically minded people aren't used to thinking that way. It goes back to education. Most engineering and computer-science programs don't teach people to think that way about design. In the past, it wasn't so much of a problem. But now, technology has become so much more complicated and the pace of change is so much faster that all kinds of things are technically possible. So the limiting factor isn't so much technology, as it used to be, but the human and social side of things.
