Consumer Electronics Victim

As consumers of software-based products, we are so used to accepting what we are given that we cannot see what could so easily be ours. Engineers make products that perform the tasks comprising the job but, lacking design, the collection of tasks still doesn't achieve the user's goals.

I have owned various videocassette recorders for over 20 years. All of them have had built-in facilities for delayed recording of shows, but none of these machines even the $1,500, top-of-the-line model gives me confidence that I will succeed. The interface the product presents to me is so hard to control, so hard to read, so unclear about terminology and settings, and so filled with hidden switches and modes that my success ratio has been a consistent 40%. More than half of the time, I find that I have recorded three hours of Brazilian soccer instead of the PBS special that I wanted. After years of struggling, I have merely conceded defeat and don't even try to record TV shows anymore. So has everyone in my family. So have all of my friends. We are survivors of dancing bearware.

In frustration, I go to the local Circuit City, my Visa card burning a hole in my pocket. "Here's a grand! Two grand," I shout, "for the salesperson who can bring me a VCR that I can use to record TV shows!" The shiny-suit set gather round and proffer their wares. From bargain-basement VCR to most expensive, there is no difference in interaction. Sure, there is a continuum of available features, but the actual way that I control the device is the same across the board. In other words, after 20 years of product maturation, I am no closer to being able to use the product than before. This is dancing bearware at its worst.

When I point this out to the salesman, he defends the device by saying that it is as good as it gets. He shows me where the brochure claims that it is "easy to use." Bill Gates once observed, with uncharacteristic cynicism, that the way you made software user friendly was by making a rubber stamp and stamping each box with the legend "USER FRIENDLY." Unintentionally, his method has become the computer industry's real method.

Pushbuttons don't map well to a continuum such as time, but a rotating knob does. If that VCR just had a simple rotating knob like my $11 Baby Ben alarm clock, I could set the time and banish the blinking "12:00" forever. If the device had a second knob to set the future record time, I could manage recording easily, too. As it is, by providing the flexibility to record 10 future shows, the device becomes unusable for recording any one show.

Products that are dancing bearware surround us. They have sufficient features to cover their cardboard boxes with callouts. They have enough options to fill the magazine reviewer's matrix of options with the word "Yes." But they don't make users happy or more effective. Most users can't make use of most of the options and features. Those who do are apologists who joyfully change their work habits to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of the software. They revel in the opportunity to tinker. They laboriously learn how to control new features that they will never actually use.