Devices with confusing modes

[mmcirvin]

Kathy Sierra's Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak summarizes many things that are true. My favorite part is how she characterizes the typical user reaction to an unnecessarily confusing user interface: "I suck!" People don't blame the product as much as they should.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately particularly in regard to audio equipment. You'll notice that Sierra spends a lot of time knocking stereo systems. For some reason, standards of usability for these things are comically low. My pretty new car stereo has many wonderful features and sounds great, but it is frequently infuriating because, like Sierra's Subaru factory stereo, it has too many modes, which are usually poorly indicated (or not at all) and are hard to get out of once you get into them; the button presses that make the state transitions are not obvious or consistent. When it decides to only show you tracks by a particular artist, heaven help you.

I just encountered a more extreme version of this. Over the weekend I was talking to Sam's aunt and uncle who are both blind. As usual when I meet them, they showed me all kinds of fascinating accessible-tech gadgets (this time it was the APH Book Port and the Plextalk PTR1, both of which they seem to like), and also talked about ordinary off-the-shelf gadgets that were bothering them with inconsiderate design.

Now, most of these things just weren't designed with blind users in mind, which is understandable since the market of completely blind users is fairly small (though there are a lot of people who can't see too well, including a large fraction of people over 50, and a reliance on tiny fonts and icons might be excluding them too). But in some cases the problems would have stymied or irritated even a user with 20/20 vision. Mysterious modes are particular obstacles for blind users because visual mode indicators won't work, but often the mode indicators are nonexistent or indecipherable anyway.

One they brought along was this portable XM satellite radio, a powerful, tiny device with an impressive set of features and an intensely irritating button layout (somebody please tell me what it means to put "1" and "6" on opposite sides of a rocker switch). At one point the thing got wedged in a state in which most of the controls on the front didn't seem to do anything. I lent my eyeballs but had to spend several minutes poking around in the manual before I could even figure out what was going on. It was actually a combination of three separate unusual modes, and two of them were controlled by buttons that were impossible to identify without reading the manual. One was labeled with a marketing-speak trademark (which, upon reading a few paragraphs, turned out to mean "playback"; "record" was a different, unrelated meaningless trademark) and the other had a label so abbreviated that it had become unintelligible. These particular features were of no interest to these particular users anyway, so it probably would have been better for them if they'd been entirely absent.

In the comments to the essay, people knock around the unfortunate fact that it's not actually that easy to create a limited-feature-set product, because different people want different subsets of the features. You'll never please everyone. But it's often worthwhile to try. Part of the problem is that all too often, the people who make electronics and software are early-adopter, gadget-freak types who are really attracted to the product with the most features and think of figuring out how to use them as a diverting puzzle. I'm like that in some ways. But most people are not like that.

Note: This post was originally entitled "Attack of the finite state automata", but Sam pointed out that I'd committed a usability error of my own by giving it a cleverly obscure title. So in the spirit of Don Norman retitling The Psychology of Everyday Things to The Design of Everyday Things (the original title had the wrong affordances), I've changed it.

Comments

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Have you read Raskin's 'The Humane Interface?' If no, we can lend it you. It's reeeally interesting. And useful.
At work, I'm often reminded how modal 3DS Max is, and made to sniffle wistfully over how I remember Maya relying on quasimodes much more often (marking menu). I am trying to get work to switch, but it may be a battle. Positively, our behavior guy is used to Maya, so maybe there is hope after all.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I have gone from being a competent compugeek to being a complete moron, thanks to software which has the same drawbacks as the XM satellite radio you mentioned. The problem I have is that a shareware program or product touts itself as being a "CD ripper" or "automatic Usenet posting device" or whatever, but when you install it, there is no obvious way to do that one thing you downloaded it for. The exceptions to this rule are usually substandard products that go too far to the other extreme. PuTTY is the only really good mid-level program I have that allows some tweaking but is also plug-and-play enough that you can use it without a single tweak.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

Microwave ovens are the nadir of user interface design.

I'd written several paragraphs expanding on this theme, but it all really boiled down to this: microwave ovens enrage me.