In innovation jargon, this phenomenon is known as dominant design. The question of "too late" is less about how how superior a new design is, and more about how willing people are to pay the learning & change costs required to learn the new thing. In the Apple Play/pause case, there are small learning costs: it's the removal of one of two redundant buttons most are already familiar with. In the QWERTY case the learning costs are huge: it would take hours for someone to become half as proficient with DVORAK or some other theoretically superior keyboard design as they already are with QWERTY.
Designs like QWERTY often come along for the ride on some other innovation - Sholes wasn't worried much about optimal human performance, he was trying to make a decent, non-jamming typewriter. But once the typewriter was successful, and accepted, it'd be very hard to sell a product that offered 20% efficiency gains, at the price of a week of typing misery: the percieved reward is low. Many good innovations never mainstream because no one can figure out a good business model for selling it it, or for getting people interested in improving something they don't think about anymore. In innovation history often designs like QWERTY are *only* replaced when the entire technology gets left behind: the day voice recognition, or mind reading, takes over, QWERTY will become a memory. (Similiarly, few worried about improving Morse code once we had telephones). But often that new technology brings along with it some unanticipated design equivalent of QWERTY that we realize later wasn't quite right, and the same issues of dominant design and learning costs come into play again So the good news is that designers will have plenty of work long into the future - or at least plenty of things to complain about :) -Scott ----- Original Message ----- From: "W Evans" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Matt Theakston" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "IXDA list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 6:50 AM Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Why Import/Export - A broken metaphor. MoreSemantic thoughts from the underground. > It is possible. Apple did it when they removed the "Stop" button from the > iPod and from iTunes. Before that, it was commonly accepted that an > interface for a player had to have Play, Pause, Stop, Forward and Rewind - > even though Stop only makes sense when the device is a tape deck. People > have accepted that. So I think it is possible. > > On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Matt Theakston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > When is it too late to change an "accepted cultural convention in the > > computer world"? ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
