Predicting the future

Recently I've been reading or watching a few different older sci-fi works, and I'm particularly intrigued by how they believed the future would be, and how wrong they frequently were.

Paper
In Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (1968), there are numerous references to carbon papers and onionskins -- in fact I don't think there is any reference to anything resembling a modern computer with an interface. And yet in this same book, which is the inspiration for "Blade Runner," there are androids that are so nearly identical to humans as to require bone marrow samples to determine if they are human or real. He was able to envision a future with complicated thinking robots, but not a future in which something more permanent and flexible than paper existed. (Obviously paper is still used, but could you imagine if the entire record of a criminal only existed on a photocopy somewhere, and not digitally stored?)

Televisions
Watching "Aliens" (1986) and the later, rarely remembered TV series "Earth 2" (1994-95), I am struck by how they both failed to foresee the death of the old cathode-ray monitor. Thin LCD and plasma screens have already well outpaced old-school TVs, and new OLED screens are so thin as to be pliable. It's also interesting to see how whenever "static" or a weak signal is depicted, it is shown through the screen turning fuzzy or lines running across the screen, as one might experience with a weak antenna. Well, as anyone with digital cable or even online video watchers may know, when you get a crappy video, you see pixellation and possibly missed frames.

Gadgetry
Whether it's the phone in "Aliens" (dialing via sticking a plastic card into a slot) or the VR "gear" in "Earth 2" (a bulky headset with awkwardly swinging eyepieces), a lot of sci-fi failed to predict things like Bluetooth (which is little more than an earbud) or even simple speed-dialing. And interestingly, nearly every piece of sci-fi seems to have thought that video-phones would be the way of the future. Well, the technology has been around for quite some time, and it just never took off. Why? Because we multitask, and if we're talking on the phone, there really is no need to also see the person. We might be doing the dishes or driving or doing some other task. We just don't really need or want that most of the time.

So what are we getting wrong now?
There are undoubtedly a number of things that will begin to look foolishly short-sighted in our current predictions of the future. I think of the standard keyboard and wonder if that will die -- will we continue typing this way at all? Will "typing" even exist as communication? I'm willing to bet that we'll soon be seeing more and more examples of mind-controlled interfaces. I'm not talking anything magic here, but just complicated systems of interpreting electrical impulses in the brain. This may not be any time soon, but when you set something far in the future, it's worth considering.

There's also something I've been reading about lately -- devices that are essentially real "transformers" -- objects that can become other objects. Essentially a collection of "nano-machines" that can rebuild themselves based on the user's need. I don't know the limitations of this, but it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing self-reconstructing devices within the next 20 years.

But, hey, in the 1960s they all thought we'd be taking rockets to the moon for vacation by now. And boy were they wrong.

More on the overlap of politics and usability

In my last entry I mentioned how I feared getting too political. But despite that fear I'm going to soldier on. I've become borderline obsessed with the economy, and various approaches to handling it, and have constantly been thinking about the decisions I would think best were I in a position of power.

Full disclosure -- I have considered myself most closely connected to libertarianism, as I like the concept that we really should be free to do what we want without government intervention. But, and here's where usability kicks in -- we don't always *know* everything necessary to make the best choices.

There seems to be two sides to this -- either you say that it is up to you to educate yourself, and a bad choice is your own fault, but you are free to make it, or you say that people should be prevented from making such bad choices through regulation and laws that take bad options off the table.

I've come to appreciate the concept of "soft paternalism" or "libertarian paternalism," which basically says, you are free to make whatever choice you want, but we are going to try our best to steer you in the right direction.

This is almost the essence of usability in a nutshell. Make it easy for people to make choices that will satisfy them. Emphasize the most common or most logical paths but provide alternate routes to get to other options if someone knows specifically what they already want. The wikipedia article I link above has a great description, with specific reference to "defaults" -- a concept that usability expert Jakob Nielsen has written about, stressing the importance of setting defaults wisely so they are set to the most likely beneficial setting.

Compare the two. Wikipedia, giving the example of setting your retirement contribution from your paycheck (emphasis mine in both quotes):

The asymmetry of soft paternalism can be seen in the case of a policy which raises default rates. Those who are making an informed deliberate choice to put aside zero percent of their income in tax deferred savings still have this option, but those who were not saving simply out of inertia or due to procrastination are helped by higher default contribution rates.

Now read Jakob Nielsen:

Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to. ... By educating and guiding users, default values help reduce errors. It's therefore important to select helpful defaults, rather than those based on the first letter of the alphabet or whatever the first option on your original list happened to be.

Imagine for a moment that at all aspects of our lives, rather than starting from "zero" on any new thing, we started anything by being told right off the bat what the most common or most beneficial starting place was, but were given the option to change that in any way we see fit. Smart businesses already apply this in many areas, essentially putting Nielsen's usability advice in effect. But I think the applications of such a concept are much more far-reaching.

I don't know that this means that "soft paternalism" and "good usability" are identical, or that the concepts therein can be applied universally, but I was struck at the similarities between the two. At the very least, it shows that you can successfully apply similar philosophies to different disciplines.

Could better usability save the economy?

Okay, maybe that headline is an overstatement, but I'd say usability is an overlooked component in saving the economy. Like any American who pays attention to current events, the economic downturn is at the forefront of my mind right now. And there is one area that has troubled me quite a bit -- the whole mortgage meltdown.

There are kind of two sides to the mortgage problem (ignoring for a moment the whole "credit swaps" thing -- which is a pretty big piece to ignore but just roll with me here): there are the individuals who bought homes they could not afford, and there are the lenders who signed off on mortgages they likely knew the buyer could not afford to repay.

Much has been made of the "predatory lenders" -- the system is set up such that a lot of the places granting the initial mortgages get a few years of high (or all) interest payments before passing the mortgage off to some larger firm for the remainder and letting them deal with the fallout of potential foreclosure. Ultimately, the initial lenders don't really care about whether or not the lendee can pay it all back -- they just want that initial burst of nearly pure-profit payments.

But what bothers me about this attack on "predatory lenders" is that pretty much any business out there seeks to increase profit, so why pick on lenders? It seems to be to be attaching some moral expectation to something that is amoral (not immoral, mind you). Paying for goods and services is a mutual exchange where each side gets something they want.

The consumer-minded side says this is unfair, but I think it's risky to remove any responsibility from the individual. If you sign a contract that requires you to pay a certain amount of money, it's ultimately your own fault if you end up unable to hold up your end of the bargain. Really, a foreclosure is the fault of the homeowner, not the lender -- even if the lender suspected you wouldn't be able to pay it back, if you have stated that you can and will pay things back, you're the one who's made the promise you can't keep.

Where this all breaks down is that not every lender is going to be explicit in terms of costs, not every homeowner is going to know to check all the fine print, and those two problems can feed off each other into a pretty dangerous spiral.

This is where usability comes into play. One of the tenets of good usability is that you don't blame the "user" if they have a problem. Even if everything to accomplish a task is there, if your users are failing to do it, then you have a problem with the presentation. You don't just say your users are stupid (because then you're both insulting your customers and losing business), you try to adjust things to make it clearer and easier to understand.

I am not familiar with the rules and regulations around signing a mortgage, but I am virtually certain the amount of paperwork involved would be confusing to even the savviest person. From a usability perspective, it's a nightmare. I have no doubt that people have signed contracts not realizing that the initial $800 a month payment is going to balloon to $2000, or that the total they pay for a $300,000 home is actually going to be something like a million dollars.

Imagine for a moment that regulations required that all major contracts have a one-page cover sheet that included clearly the monthly payment, how the monthly payment may change over time, the breakdown of interest and principal, and the total amount to be eventually paid. All of this in nice big fonts with a clear layout that is easy to read.

I fear getting too political in this blog, but I can't help but think that so many of the problems in our current economic crisis boil down to people making decisions without knowing all the information. And while many people think that the problem was a lack of regulating the kinds of decisions that could be made, I would say that the greater problem was not requiring full disclosure and clarity be provided before anyone makes any major transaction. Whether that is a potential homeowner or a potential investor, if there was a requirement of a crystal clear one-sheet explanation of the pending transaction in layman's terms, you may find fewer questionable decisions being made in the first place.

As an analogy, New York City recently began requiring chain restaurants to print calorie information next to meals. The caloric totals shocked people (some salads have more calories than a burger and fries!?), but those trying to eat healthy had full information at their disposal rather than uninformed guessing. Compare this regulation to some alternative legislation that may have required that restaurants stop serving high calorie dishes altogether. The former regulation puts the onus on the individual, but provides them with full disclosure in a clear manner. The other is the government deciding what's good for you, expecting that you won't make the good decision for yourself and taking options off the table. I'm sure some people would still prefer the latter, but I really think that letting people make their own choice, for good or bad, is better than trying to make it for them -- just make sure they know the consequences of their choices.

Usability is ultimately about providng clear information. If we can manage that, and let people make fully informed decisions, we can encourage responsibility without removing choice.

So I got an iPhone

I'm not really a gadget-head. As a diehard skeptic of, well, everything, I typically meet any new gadget with the question "why would I need this?" And usually there is no compelling reason.

But after spending months with a phone that repeatedly shut itself off upwards of ten times a day, sometimes mid-phone call, I was ready to switch, and decided to just go ahead and plunk down the dollars for an iPhone. I'm so happy I did.

I knew that it would combine my phone and MP3 player into one device, which I liked. I also knew it'd allow a few more things, namely web browsing. But I didn't realize the extent to which its app store would make the device an all-in-one EVERYTHING. I can play video games, control my desktop from the phone, update my Facebook status, listen to radio stations... it's pretty cool. (I should note, for the record, that lest this read like an Apple ad I am sure that similar smartphones like the G1 and Blackberry Storm are capable of doing many of these things as well.)

But as I was browsing reviews for good apps and downloading them on my laptop, it struck me as odd that I still have to actually attach a wire from the laptop to the iPhone. A minor problem, really, but it got me thinking about the future of computing and the whole concept of syncing. We are moving further and further away from a hard-coded "this machine does this" mindset to a software-driven wireless world where you can do anything from anywhere from any machine. We've already moved past some of the typical physical limitations of the world -- I haven't bought a CD in 2 years for example, yet have bought tons of music. Virtually every piece of software people get these days no longer requires a box with a disc in it, and can be just downloaded online. And as hardware limitations decrease to the point where, in all likelihood, we are just a few years away from pretty much every new computer can do pretty much everything, the actual machines we're on may reach a point of irrelevance as well. Imagine going up to any computer anywhere, logging in with some password, and having all of the same data and programs available to you anywhere. Services like this already exist, but this is by no means universal.

We're going to just all have our own "clouds" at some point soon. An amalgamam of files, programs, software, data, etc. that requires no physical anything except for the data storage facilities of the providers.

Not to get all sci-fi on you, but this basically means there will be two versions of any of us. The physical being, and the data identity. Some people find that scary, I find it fascinating.

And to me the most interesting part of all of this is that it happens so quickly and seamlessly. Just imagine ten years ago, the whole concept of your whole world reachable by one device in your pocket was probably hard to fathom. But it has happened, and is getting more dramatically omnipresent every day.

Which is just. So. Cool.