Last week I encountered a few situations where all I could think was, "why is this still so difficult?" In one case, someone who was incredibly tech savvy was having difficulty getting a TV to work with a particular attached device -- shouldn't this be easy by now? Why do we all still have four television remotes? Why is there such a confusing jumble of wires and inputs? Why haven't we figured this out yet? Virtually everyone (at least in the US) has a TV and at least one device attached to it -- a DVD player, a cable box, or maybe a TiVo, or AppleTV, or even a full home media system -- but these systems still seem designed from an engineer's perspective, not for the average Joe.
I don't know how to answer all those questions I posited there, but I'm hoping that we eventually reach a point where we start making a little more room for real world usability. I've heard (unfortunately I can't cite a statistic) that HDTVs are frequently returned because people think they're broken, when in reality it's because they haven't attached it to their cable connection correctly or they have not properly adjusted the settings, and if you mess all that up, the end picture often looks worse than old analog TV. But, how is an average person supposed to know that? And at what point do you get enough complaints and returns to actually go back to the design phase and say, "let's simplify this"?
A lot of designers thinks this means that people are stupid, and you have to oversimplify to the point of babying people. Let's snap out of that mindset, and instead try putting ourselves in someone else's shoes. Imagine some field you know nothing at all about, and now imagine an expert working on something that is ultimately meant for you, the "average" person. Wouldn't you want them to make it as clear and easy for you to understand as possible? So why balk at doing that in design?
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