Guru: Engineers Won't Design Next-Gen Systems

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May 07, 1999 (6:27 AM EDT)

Guru: Engineers Won't Design Next-Gen Systems

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Engineers are the wrong people to define and design next-generation consumer-electronics equipment, keynoter Don Norman told an audience full of engineers at the Embedded Processor Forum here Tuesday.

"It's not you guys" who will build equipment and systems that are easy to use, said Norman, of the Nielsen Norman consultancy. "You're the wrong people." Instead, future systems will be designed "by psychologists and social scientists working in combination with engineers and technologists," he said he predicted.

Norman, who wrote The Invisible Computer and The Psychology of Everyday Things and is an advocate of user-friendly designs, described as inevitable an electronics industry where ease of use fuels development efforts.

As the performance of processors and other technologies improves, Norman said, markets will be driven not by technology capabilities, but by the demands of late adopters and less savvy consumers who do not care about the underlying technology and who will not tolerate equipment that is difficult to use.

"There's a massive change being driven by consumers, a revolt against complexity and unreliability," Norman said. "Embedded processors will enable this revolution, but they aren't sufficient to ensure it. They promise the revolution, but [it will happen] only if you adopt a human-centered design philosophy."

According to Norman, who previously held positions with Apple and Hewlett-Packard, a new era of consumer-driven product innovation will require a new design philosophy and, probably, new companies to execute such a philosophy well.

Helped by the digitization of electronics and the arrival of embedded processors, the consumer-electronics market is beginning to take off, Norman said. "But the consumer market is very different from the industrial market, the automation market and the computer market traditionally served by electronics," he said. "The biggest barrier, and one I'm not sure this industry knows how to overcome, is how to make things easy to use."

Historically, the electronics industry has not generally been capable of delivering easy-to-use products, Norman said. As a result, the industry has been shaped by engineers designing for the market of early adopters who would tolerate arcane and complex interfaces.

That won't fly anymore, Norman said, but "I don't think [even the consumer-electronics companies like Sony and Philips] really understand, because after all, they gave us the VCR," he said. Norman earlier had cited the VCR as a classic technology-driven consumer-electronics design, which, as a class of equipment, is notoriously difficult to operate.

Norman also singled out 3Com's PalmPilot in support of his thesis. "The most successful handheld computer has the slowest processor. The reason Palm is a winner is because it uses trailing-edge technology and minimal features.

"Two AA batteries lasting more than a month and a shape fitting into a shirt pocket at low cost was the overriding philosophy," Norman said. The designers, he said, did not let themselves get distracted by trying to add extra features.

Norman broke with conventional wisdom by saying it was important not to include customers' wish-list features in product iterations. Juggling features against performance and power budgets is one of the ways the coherency and usability of a product is destroyed, he said.

"It's important to know what your product is, focus on it, and don't listen to your customers -- but do it with care," he said.

In closing, Norman said despite being 50 years old, the computer industry hasn't even approached its full potential. "Consumers are ready and waiting for computers to deliver on their promise. [Computers] aren't doing that because we're not building the right computers," he said.