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Computers: Are They Easier to Use ?

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Here’s my simple test for a product of today’s technology:

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I go to the bookstore and check the shelves for remedial books.

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The more books there are, the more my suspicions are raised.

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If computers and computer programs are getting easier to use,

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why are so many companies still making a nice living

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publishing books on how to use them?

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Computers manipulate information,

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but information is invisible.

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There’s nothing to see or touch.

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The programmer decides what you see on the screen.

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Computers don’t have knobs like old radios.

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They don’t have buttons, not real buttons.

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Instead, more and more programs display pictures of buttons,

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moving even further into abstraction and arbitrariness.

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I like computers, but I hope they will disappear,

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that they will seem as stranger to our descendants

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as the technologies of our grandparents appear to us.

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Today’s computers are indeed getting easier to us,

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but look where they started:

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so difficult that almost any improvement was welcome.

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Computers have the power to allow people within a company,

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across a nation or even around the world to work together.

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But this power will be wasted

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if tomorrow’s computers aren’t designed

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around the needs and capabilities

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of the human beings who must use them —

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a people-centered philosophy, in other words.

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This means retooling computers to cope with human strengths,

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observing, communicating and innovating instead of asking people

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to conform to the unnatural behavior computers demand.

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That just leads to error.

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Many of today’s machines try to do too much.

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When a complicated work processor attempts to double

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as a desktop pulsing program or a kitchen appliance

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come with half a dozen attachments,

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the product is bound to be awkward and burdensome.

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My favorite example of a technological product

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on just the right scale

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is an electronic dictionary.

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It can be made smaller,

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lighter and far easier to use than a print version,

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not only giving meanings but even pronouncing the words.

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Today’s electronic dictionaries,

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with their tiny keys and barely legible displays,

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are primitive but they are on the right track.