Helping Users Connect With Devices
The device looked like an impervious slab of silver. And to Trevor Kaufman’s team around the conference table, its purpose seemed equally impenetrable.
It’s a DVD burner, offered one.
No, it’s a personal video recorder, countered another.
A hard drive? A server?
“It’s a weird dual device,” said Kaufman, chief executive of Culver City-based Schematic Inc., one of several U.S. design companies that consumer electronics makers hire to make complicated and confusing entertainment machines easy to use.
The design companies have their work cut out. For people who just figured out how to program their VCRs, the future holds a bewildering array of gadgets like the silver slab, invented by a client Schematic won’t name. (The slab is a DVD recorder, burner and player that can store television broadcasts on a hard drive.)
Engineers are harnessing the ever-increasing power of chips and the Internet to create devices that do multiple things. Sony Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cablevision Systems Corp. and others are busy building next-generation entertainment systems that will deliver TV shows, games, music and movies.
Unless viewers can access all those goodies quickly from their La-Z-Boys, though, the audience for all-in-one devices will be limited to the hard-core geeks who love technology for its own sake.
“The consumer electronics industry has to realize that complexity is holding it back,” said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, a technology research and design firm in Fremont, Calif. “Too many features guarantees complexity. People don’t want to upgrade because they fear complexity.”
Schematic’s job is to simplify. Around the conference table in Culver City, as Kaufman’s team teased out the DVD device’s functions, the big problem clearly was “user interface” -- an industry term for the way people interact with technology.
A TV screen hooked up to the device showed the interface: dull blue screens with small white text that made everyone in the room squint. The words -- “mode,” “status,” “source,” “destination,” “direct navigator,” “flexible recording,” “disc setting” -- yielded few clues.
A large whiteboard next to the TV was nearly full with items under the “Problems” heading. There was no main menu, no help function, no visual clues to show people what they were doing, no instructions to tell people what they should do next and a 56-button remote control that was anything but intuitive. The list soon ran to 14 separate issues.
Suddenly inspired, one of the team members, Dale Herigstad, strode to the whiteboard. His pale skin and shock of spiky platinum-white hair contrasting with his black clothes, Herigstad drew four neat little squares lined up in a row inside a larger box representing a screen. The squares would show icons that represent the four basic things people could do: watch DVDs, watch TV, record shows or burn DVDs.
Kaufman liked it. “We can pack a lot of information in here,” he said.
But Herigstad, a 53-year-old graphic designer who won three Emmys for his broadcast television work, asked: “At the end of the day, would this be too much for people to know?”
It was a key question. Technologists often try to cram as many features as they can into a device, and the resulting products can look like they were built on the island of Dr. Moreau: cellphones that take photos, music players that store phone numbers, TVs that print photos and game consoles with TV tuners.
“These days, people are designing fairly complex things,” Herigstad said. “But the TV audience is different from a PC audience. They want to sit back and not do much when they watch TV. They’re often sitting in the dark, so they don’t want to be fumbling with a remote that has dozens of tiny, little buttons. These are the things we wrestle with all the time -- how to take powerful functionality and filter it to make it really simple.”
The need to decipher devices is relatively new. The controls for TVs, radios and phones stayed static for decades because their functions didn’t really change much. Then came videocassette recorders, sales of which took off in the early 1980s, and the flashing “12:00” became a fixture in millions of households.
Things only got more complex in the 1990s, when microchips became cheap enough and fast enough to show up in just about everything. As devices did more, they needed software to control them. So designers looked to the computer industry for clues on what to do -- and what not to do.
For most of their history, computers haven’t been user-friendly machines. Consider punch cards and DOS. Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh was the first personal computer to deploy the point-and-click environment most people now use to make their machines do what they want.
The rise of the World Wide Web introduced a brutal, Darwinistic environment where attention spans were measured in seconds and shopping carts abandoned at astonishing rates.
“People suddenly realized websites have to be drop-dead simple, or people won’t bother,” said Jeff Johnson, a user interface consultant in San Francisco. He and other so-called usability engineers suddenly had more work than they could handle, analyzing eye movements, attention spans and click-through rates.
Interfaces that work tend to be simple, Nielsen said. “That’s what we learned from the Web. Simple websites do better. Think Google,” which has a minimalist home page.
Good interfaces also are consistent, said Deborah Mayhew, a usability consultant and author. By assigning colors to particular tasks, for example, designers can help people navigate through technology instead of having to guess from screen to screen.
“People look for patterns,” Mayhew said.
Another trick is to use real-world metaphors for virtual tasks, for example, a trash can icon for deleting documents or the word “desktop” for the personal computer’s graphical interface, Mayhew said.
“The human mind looks for similarities to other things we know how to deal with,” she said.
Eyes also look for movement to detect change. “That’s why a cursor blinks,” Mayhew said.
Kaufman built a business on these ideas. Schematic has about $10 million in annual sales.
One client is New York-based Cablevision, which tapped Schematic to design an interface for a game service launched this month in 1 million homes. Cablevision, which charges $4.95 a month for the service, sees the project as the tip of an entertainment iceberg.
“The challenge of interactive television is that you have a limited amount of real estate on the screen to engage people and explain to them what you’re offering,” said Patrick Donoghue, vice president of Cablevision’s interactive television unit. “Dale came up with something that was graphically rich, beautiful to look at and engaging, but not at the expense of the function.”
Herigstad’s solution was to build screens that let viewers scroll left to right, going from a main menu to submenus that displayed gradually more detailed information, from the different game genres to descriptions of individual titles.
Cablevision is hoping Schematic’s design will entice consumers to do something they’re not entirely used to -- buy services from their TVs. It’s something Apple had to figure out when designing its iTunes service, which sells digital songs via the Internet.
“We were trying to introduce concepts for things average people have never done before,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of applications and Internet services. “Few people are used to buying something that doesn’t have a physical-ness to it. So we had to make it as clear and simple as possible.”
The Cupertino, Calif., company designed its site so a buyer has to enter his or her address and credit card information only once. Thereafter, a single click buys a song -- no checkout process. Apple also relied on real-world parallels to make consumers feel comfortable, such as using album covers. The strategy has paid off, and iTunes has sold more than 73 million songs since launching in April 2003.
“It’s the easy and obvious part that’s challenging,” Cue said. “You can always add a lot of complexity and features because of the technology behind it. The hard part is figuring out what you say ‘no’ to, and figuring out how to make the experience better than what people already have today.”
Schematic is deploying similar graphical techniques in a project with Microsoft to build set-top-box software that will let viewers record TV, organize their digital music collections and play DVDs. And in Japan, Schematic helped Sony build software for cable television set-top boxes that also deliver Internet access, called So-Net.
To be sure, Schematic’s line of work is niche at best, said President Richard Titus, who estimates that the market for its type of service is just “several hundred million dollars” a year worldwide.
Though it’s a small industry, many believe it’s an increasingly important aspect of technology, one that can even help determine which products catch on with consumers and which end up on a junk heap.
“Companies that emphasize a good user interface can get a huge competitive advantage,” Nielsen said. “Apple is a really good example of that.”
