The Technograph

What does a fighter jet have to do with an iPod?

“Built a computer for my dad, whilst dealing with various issues along the way. Now my parents should be able to skype, watch internet tv, and surf the net from their TV. Unfortunately, the experience had to be completely perfect, and it wasn’t.”

I wrote this paragraph in an email to some colleagues and it made me realize something about electronics: I had some great usability ideas to make using a computer a natural experience for my dad, who has little familiarity with technology: namely a tablet as a “keyboard” and a wiimote as a pointing device.

The idea was that he could use the same mechanic he’s been using for years with the TV remote and handwriting and simply migrate to the computer. Unfortunately, there are a few minor hitches:

Handwriting recognition is finicky…and requires some technical know-how to edit

Wi-fi connection is poor

Wiimote needs to be paired to the bluetooth to work

Wiimote requires glovePIE and a script to run correctly

For me, these problems are not that serious. With my fluency in troubleshooting technology, these are all minor hurdles. But for an every day user, any one of these are show-stoppers when it comes to the promised product.

It can’t be “good enough.” There are plenty of “good enough” solutions you can hack together yourself. For the consumer, it has to be absolutely accessible.

It has to be perfect.

The iPod: Interface King?

The answer to that question is that a fighter jet, like an iPod, is perfect.

“Perfect!” you scoff. Good, exquisitely engineered and refined over years of development, certainly, but perfect?

Yes, perfect. Contrary to what you will read in most books, perfectionism doesn’t kill business and doesn’t hold you back. Neurotic tendencies kill business and hold you back. Perfectionism, properly applied, is the holy grail of UI design.

Neurotic tendencies include tweaking and redesigning a product that you have never shown anyone else. Neurotics attempt to implement every part of a grand master plan that exists solely in their heads, not realizing that modern issues are not about complexity or features, but simplicity and elegance – a filtering of what is, most likely, already available.

Twitter is beautifully simple, but all of its components – sms, search, tagging, email, IM – existed before Twitter. What made it compelling is not a coming together of every feature, but a coming together of certain features.

Perfectionism, meanwhile, includes tweaking and redesigning a product that you imagine to be already massively popular, taking the best input from the best users and persistently developing towards some unknowable benchmark of what perfect should be. What this means is that every checkpoint along the way actively redefines users’ perceptions of what perfection is.

With fighter jets, it was found that pilots’ reaction times weren’t quick enough to control every aspect of its operation. To bridge the gap between human and machine, a chip was designed to handle operations too fine and too quick for the human mind. The user understands the metaphor; the computer implements it.

Likewise, the iPod has a history of successful user interfaces, successful because they employed metaphors that anticipated users’ natural tendencies. Video game companies have known since they invented the directional thumbstick that the two most natural movements for the thumb are pressing a button (up and down) and circular motions, and the most natural way to control a tab-shaped mp3 player is with the thumb. Voila! Scroll wheel. And as for touch screens, it’s equally natural to assume that when you grab two ends of something and stretch, it’s going to grow bigger. Voila! Multitouch zooming.

It’s about simplicity, not features for the sake of features. User metaphors have simple aims, and features should be natural outgrowths of the metaphor employed to meet the user’s desires.

No matter the complexity of the tools, the man-machine gap should be as small and seamless as possible. Using technology should be as simple as using your voice to speak, or your mind to think.

Usermeld.

Tagged with: ipod, fighter, jet, interface, concept, cool