technology working for you, not against you

Technology is a field completely invented and controlled by humans. It is the science of better and better tools. Tools that are supposed to help ours lives.

Yet sometimes technology works against us, instead of for us. Tools themselves are not natural. We have to take time (or money) to learn to use the tool. A tool becomes perverted went we invest more time learning it, then it using it, or when it saves use less time then we had to invest to learn it in the first place.

This is why interfaces are so important. We use computers, cellphones, printers, micorwaves or even lower-tech tools like cars, with interfaces to the underlying technology. When you think about it, for all theses devices, someone somewhere decided that putting things this way or that way might be a good idea. Modern devices, cars included, have a lot more functions, and all these need to be accessible by the same, or a better interface. Which almost always means having to learn something new each time. Which also means that someone had to think about how to implement it.

Yet compagnies don't spend that much time on interfaces. Products are designed by engineers more interested in functionnality than design. Marketing is often more interested in functionnality than design, because functionnality are better selling point than design. Corporate buyers are interested in fucntionnality because it easily correlate to Return-on-investement. And simple buyers always ask 'what does it do' and not, 'how does it works?', some functionnality than to sell well.

Of course, if you don't want your product returned to the store, it has to be at a minimum functional. But as I get more and more frustrated with computer, I tend to think, maybe, just maybe there could be a better way to design an interface with computer.

Than I see things like this Ok / Cancel Comic strip and I see that things could be FAR worse. We have come a long way since Eniac and the Havard Mark I.