People-Friendly Tech

By Jason Cross of My tech life at ExtremeTech

Take a look at the following web search portals: yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com. Which would you rather use? Google isn't just the most popular search engine (by far) because it delivers the most relevant search results and indexes most of the web. It has also made a point, from day one, to offer a very simple portal page with nothing but the basics needed for search. If you want news, or weather, or email, or whatever-else, you go to a different portal. Putting all that crap on the Yahoo! and MSN home pages, in effect, is making assumptions about your searches.

They're saying "we bet you're going to search for the top news headline, and the weather, and sports, and some generic shopping terms…" which of course, you aren't. Or if you are, the odds that the portal page is showing you the things you would have searched for are pretty low. It's a bunch of noise, and regardless of what the click-through stats may say, we all know that nobody actually wants it.

Of course, they're starting to learn their lessons. Microsoft's new and improved search engine, Live.com, is as sparse as Google, and so is the new Ask.com. They're simple, usable, and attractive. They're poor portals from a business sense, because they're harder to monetize. But nobody goes to a search portal for its monetization features.

The rest of the tech world is going the same way. Smart phones and PDAs used to be expensive, ugly, clunky, and useful primarily for their ability to keep all your business contacts, email, and calendar updated when you're away from the office. That used to be enough. But now regular people are buying smart phones. They want the phone itself to be sleek and attractive. They want it to be vastly easier to use. They want music players and games and web browsers that work.

One could easily look at the number of Windows Mobile phones sold in a year, compared to the number of iPhones, and say that targeting the "hard to use but integrates well with corporate IT departments" market is still stronger. But it's not getting your company on the cover of Time or Newsweek. It's not making the blogs harp on about every tiny little software update or nifty application. Most importantly, no matter how much money you bring in, it's not making the stock price go up.

Coming to Grips with People-Oriented Tech

A whole host of companies are coming to grips with the fact that the next 15 years of technology—gadgets, computers, cars, software, phones, etc.—are not going to be like the last 15 years. The success of technology companies is going to increasingly rely on their ability to make their products approachable, dramatic, attractive, and usable by ordinary people. Perhaps there is no better example of a company making this transition than Microsoft.

Windows has some serious advantages over OS X when it comes to large-scale deployment. There's nothing in OS X as useful for IT departments and the Group Policy stuff in Windows, for instance. Nonetheless, Vista uptake is not what was expected (despite Microsoft's claims about how satisfied they are with it) and there's a large public sentiment that it's simply not much better than Windows XP.

Part of the problem is that, despite a wide number of under-the-hood changes, the UI itself is too much like a sleeker, polished version of XP. The Start button doesn't say Start anymore and there are "breadcrumbs" in Explorer, but really dramatic changes are nowhere to be seen. When Vista was code-named Longhorn, and they would show off concept videos at the Platform Developers Conference, the interface was dramatically different. Over time, as the release approached, it was focus-grouped and committee'd into oblivion, and we're left with an interface that is more usable, yes, but also all too familiar.

In planning and executing the user interface for Windows Vista, Microsoft lost sight of one simple truth: Nobody can see what is under the hood, and nobody will care unless they run into problems. And that's a bad kind of caring. Low-level changes need to be accompanied by the kind of high-level, highly visible changes that shake up people's familiarity. People aren't going to say "this network transfer is fast!" in a new system unless the network transfer at first looks different, shocking a placid audience into paying attention.

Microsoft is stuck on an unfortunate road for this new future of sexy, user-centric computing. They build software made to run on a wide variety of hardware, often with dramatically different capabilities. Their customers will get this software when buying a device (computer, phone, whatever) from a company that licensed the software with little say in its development, or whose voice was part of a cacophony of competing vendors. They'll buy the cheapest parts they can to make the most profit possible.

And then there are the parts of Microsoft that have got the message. In the Entertainment and Devices division, products like Zune and Xbox have top-to-bottom control over the hardware and software. Not only are the devices slick-looking and approachable, but the software that runs on them is shockingly usable, for a Microsoft product. The Zune desktop software is slick, fast, pretty, user-customizable, and in general a joy to use. The Xbox 360 dashboard takes an enormous number of capabilities and settings, content and services, and presents it in a logical fashion.

Oddly enough, the champion of simple, attractive, user-centric design, Apple, has slipped in some areas. iTunes used to be the most elegant way to organize and purchase music. Over time, so many features have been tacked on that the interface is now cluttered, busy, slow, and cumbersome.

The next few years will deliver lots of nifty new tech: phones built on Google's Android platform, Windows 7, future iTunes deployments and iPods/iPhones, Zune updates, next-generation consoles, fancier in-dash car computing, and much more. Will enough time be spent making sure products are the kind of attractive, simple, eminently usable things that you could hand to anyone without explaining how to use it?

Will more products, services, and software go the way of Palm, falling far from a high perch because they couldn't adjust to the new market demands? Will old-guard tech companies like IBM, Microsoft, Dell, or HP land on the cover of major news magazines and newspapers with a truly "gotta have it" product or service, or will they continue to sell to a dwindling market of those willing to put up with technology instead of delighting in it?