Udhay Shankar N wrote:
1. I once said, a couple of decades ago, that "the net is about sociology, not technology" (which got me quoted, among other places, in _The Cluetrain Manifesto_). Picking up from there, it seems that today's devices are more about biology and psychology than technology.
Well, psychology has always had a big role to play in good design. My specialty, back when I did electronic design, was creating (hardware) human interfaces that were logical, effective, and attractive. Psychology -- particularly a deep understanding of the typical user -- was key to this.
What struck me most about the piece was Volvo's consideration for weaning users off the old interface gently as they introduced a new control paradigm. This is why old farts like me are having as much trouble as we do adapting to smart phones -- there's a break from both the telephone and the computer interfaces we were accustomed to, and the smartphone obliged us to learn both at once. Bad design by this standard.
It's easy to say that there will always be a market for "old-fashioned phones that just make phone calls"; it's much harder to say, "We muffed the transition, now we have to go back and redo it for those we left behind."
With Moore's Law seemingly still in command of the rate of progress, designers run the risk of leaving great numbers of people behind when change is imposed, and a great opportunity to engineer not only the new device, but the transition, so that we can bring nearly everyone along with us.
Cheers, / Bruce /
