Article: Why is Easy-to-Use so Hard to Do?
Hey all,
I was just reading my daily dose of news and found this article a very interesting read. I don't usually post articles, but this one just seemed interesting to me. Check it out if you got time:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/733060.asp?cp1=1
Some snippets (if you don't want to read the whole thing):
Quote:
Midway through the interview she looked up and announced that her computer had crashed, and she needed to call “Lee” to reboot it. It was an Apple II—this was a long time ago—and I said, well, that’s not hard to reboot, let me do it for you. No, she said, only Lee can get this machine to start.
OK, I said, and watched as Lee came into the room, sat down in front of the Apple II, lifted the lid and reached in to fiddle with something inside. He closed the lid, rebooted the computer successfully, then reached inside again to make another mysterious adjustment. About then he saw me watching, and it was clear I knew something about computers—including the fact that you didn’t have to reach into the circuit boards of an Apple II to reboot it. “Oh, well,” Lee said defensively, “that’s just a little tweak I put in to improve the performance.”
No: that was a little tweak that Lee put in to make Lee indispensable. And that’s the danger in letting our gurus decide what constitutes easy-to-use: if they do too good a job of it, they may put themselves out of business.
Quote:
It’s reminiscent of what happened when Steve Jobs, back in 1984, introduced the Macintosh by saying that we were going to make the personal computer as easy to use as the telephone. What we’ve done instead over the past fifteen years is make the telephone harder to use—how many people do you know who can successfully transfer a call on their latest digital office telephone?
Greg
