Re: Complicated

I don't know why gear is so complex today.

I think there are good reasons and bad reasons. You and I both miss those good ol' analog knobs that you grab and give a twist to adjust something. Simple, gives you feedback both visually and by touch, infinitely variable in most cases. Designers of all kinds of products today are infatuated with remote control, graphic visual displays, and endless menus that you have to wade through to do the simplest damn things. I'm guessing that part of the reason is because it eliminates the cost of physical switches and controls in the devices, it's all just another CPU process that's controlled using one inexpensive switch. But I'm also guessing that a reason is because that's the current culture of designers. Usability has been sacrificed to some extent to cost and fashion.

Have you ever used BMW's iDrive? It's a perfect example of this culture gone berserk. You can't use the damned thing! Many car stereos are the same way, just to a lesser degree.

The flip side is that you really do get increased level of control. I'm constantly amazed, as I scroll through the control menus of the simplest, ordinary everyday things, and find out all of the things that you can control. Useful things! Pat, you remember as well as I do what it was like, say, 35 years ago. Product "features" were, just as often as not, marketing hype and nothing more. Consumer electronics and cars, especially -- every simple, mundane function was dressed up as some kind of super-duper extra feature and given a whiz-bang slick name to make it seem special. No real advantage, nothing special at all, function-wise -- just a lot of hype.

But now, it's the opposite. You get tons and tons of functions that go unmentioned in miscellaneous menus, that you'll only discover if you happen to stumble on them by accident. It's absolutely mind-boggling what a cell phone can do, for instance, and those features don't get hyped in marketing at all. I can't believe all of the functions my Nikon digital camera can do, it's unreal. And they're all useful, too. This applies across the entire spectrum of consumer and professional goods -- washing machines, coffee makers, you name it.

What we need is some balance, some realization that the ease of use has to be there. Some designer sitting at his CAD workstation somewhere is thinking only of all the functions he can cram into his product, not how it will actually get used in the real world. Or, he's thinking that all 509 features in his product are useful to everyone, whereas the average person will only use 3 (I'm sure that if I thought about it long enough, and sepnt enough time at it, I could sort all our laundry to take to take full advantage of every one of the specific wash cycles our Bosch washer has, but, you know, good ol' "normal" has worked fine every time so far). Or, he's thinking that his device is the only one that you will have to use regularly, and that you don't also have 29 other commonly-used items that are all demanding you to follow their own arcane rules of use to get your everyday tasks done.

You and I don't want to have to drill down through 6 layers of menus to do the simplest functions -- but at the same time we ought to be glad those functions are there.
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