Any software developer will attest that building new and
more sophisticated features into a program is addictive.
The dilemma is: Will software technology be bridled by consumers’ refusal
to comprehend or use its capabilities to the fullest?
Many views, one conclusion
Information Technology is inherently complex, born out
of some of the most progressive technologies devised by the
human mind - from electricity to the Pentium IV chip. Views
range on the issue of IT complexity, from the luminaries of
the software industry to its everyday users, yet the general
opinion is that simple interfaces are necessary.
The success of the iPod not withstanding, Bill Gates thinks
that people want multi-purpose devices rather than dedicated
ones. He admits that the complexity built into the former
category of IT appliances and software must be compensated
by a very simple user interface, but building that simplicity
means adding layers of software complexity that are hidden
from the user.
Paul Saffo, a technology visionary from the California Institute
for the Future, talks of complexity phobia as “featuritis,” as
do all those consumers who, according to a Microsoft survey,
reveal that they only use 10% of the features in Microsoft
Word.
Many times, a seemingly simple computer task becomes overwhelmingly
complicated and frustrating to carry out. “Everything
I touch doesn’t work”, confesses John Maeda,
a professor in computer design at MIT and a PhD holder in
Interface Design. Maeda refers to plug-and-play devices he
tries to get his computer to recognize. What hope is then
left for the masses of consumers?
Analogue vs. Digital
Who hasn’t come across a scene like this: you have
a purchase of $8.69, a bill of $20 and want to make the cashier’s
life easier by tendering $20.69. The cashier, most likely
a high-school if not a university student, quickly gets a
calculator to figure out that the change is $12.00. This
is the very generation some analysts, such as Pip Coburn
of the Union Bank of Switzerland, label as “digital
natives” - people born into today’s technologies,
as opposed to the rest of us “analogues,” whose
best hope is to become “digital immigrants”.
These “digital natives” as well as those who,
willingly or not, will have to adapt to an increasingly self-serve
technological world, are drivers of the big demand for interface
simplicity.
Strong drivers for simplicity can also be found in the corporate
world. In the years following the boom period in IT, investments
in new systems have stalled, as earlier investments in “hot” technologies
(e.g. ERP, CRM) had not delivered the anticipated benefits.
A major reason for this falling short of expectations is
complexity. Those systems were not fully understood by the
users, and were not fully implemented by the IT departments.
The Standish Group, a research firm tracking corporate IT
purchases, concluded that 66% of all IT projects either fail
or are implemented over-budget and behind-schedule, thanks
to the complexity factor. Findings from Gartner and IDC,
who studied the impact of complexity from the angle of network
down-time and, respectively, budget spent on fixing IT failures,
also conclude that IT must conquer complexity.
“It’s the next huge thing”, says Andreas
Kluth, a distinguished journalist for the Economist.
The point is not lost on the IT industry, and its ambitions
are very high. In 2002 IBM began speaking about the “on-demand” business
model and autonomic computing. Other big firms followed with
initiatives along the same line of thinking: IT systems must
become self-configuring, self-diagnosing, self-healing and
self-optimizing. In other words, the aim for the digital
world is to emulate the analogue world. Living organisms
are indeed capable of doing all these tasks in such a natural,
apparently simple manner, that we don’t even think
about how complicated all this is - it is just natural!
Although there are many who express skepticism at these
initiatives, IT will probably follow this course. Other technologies
did it too in the past: the car was a much more complicated “animal,” when
it was born more than a century ago. Today we can drive a
car in blissful ignorance of its complexity, as long as we
can manage the wheel and two pedals. Only when the car had
reached a certain level of interface simplicity did it conquer
the market and became ubiquitous. The same happened with
other staples of modern civilization and their distribution
system: electricity, water and food.
The question now is, how long will it take for IT to become “simpler?” For
an industry where a few months means history, to achieve
in our lifetime what took nature billion of years, would
be nothing short of a miracle.
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