Overcoming People s Intimidation by Technology

Overcoming People's Intimidation by Technology

People are intimidated by what they don't understand, and more so if they believe that what they don't understand is important to their success. The difficulty in getting people to feel comfortable around technology is what C. P. Snow called the problem of two cultures - for him these were the scientific and the literary cultures; they would probably be better described as the technical and the non-technical now. The real issue is that scientists and engineers think things are important if they're technically interesting. But most people think things are important if they're useful. And those are not the same thing at all because frequently being technically interesting means being inaccessible to those who are not technologists.

When I became president of the consumer division of AT&T, one of the first things that happened was that someone from marketing brought me an ad they had been working on before I arrived, something they were very excited about. The advertising agency was coming to show me this wonderful new creative piece to get the buy-in from the new president of the division. The ad was part of what AT&T called the "You Will" campaign. It was a vignette of someone on the beach, holding a computerized slate, similar to what we would now call a PDA. The ad said, "Have you ever received a fax from the beach?" And the tag line was, "You will." My answer to the ad executives was, "Gee, I hope not."

What that ad did was confuse what we can do technologically with what we want to do in real life. Why in the world would you want a fax from your boss at the beach? The issue is not technical; it's sociological. What exactly is the protocol when your boss wants to get you, when he knows he can reach you, when he can even confirm that he has reached you, that you have the message, but you won't answer him? You're on vacation. You don't want that fax. What exactly do you say to him? What's your excuse for not responding? There has to be a sociological convention for this; having the technical capability to send faxes to the beach is not the same thing as wanting it to happen.

If you look far enough back in time, you can find an industry that has gone through the phase we're in now in the computer industry, and beyond it, so you can see the effect. Look at the turn of the century - the last one, the early 1900s. The automobile industry was at a nascent stage; it had some interesting things going on, with Ford Motor Company, in particular. I often ask technical audiences when I'm giving speeches to engineers, "What's the most important invention in the history of the automobile industry?" And I get all kinds of interesting answers: internal combustion engines, independent suspension, automatic transmission, radial tires, even tubeless tires sometimes if someone is really thoughtful about what was going on back then. But I think the answer is none of those, and it's not limited slip-differential or fuel injection, either.

The most important technical inventions in the history of the automobile industry are the electric starter and the enclosed cab. Those inventions meant you didn't have to be an engineer or a hobbyist to use the car anymore. Because of those innovations, the wives of the hobbyists (they were almost all men then) could, and would, ride in the car. Because of those innovations, the automobile was transportation instead of engineering. Only when you didn't have to crank the stupid engine outside to get it started - you could push a button to make the machine run, and then get inside the relatively comfortable cab to go somewhere - was the car useful, and therefore interesting, to non-engineers; the electric starter made the automobile accessible to the masses. Because they could ride inside the cab, where they wouldn't get their hair blown into a mess by the wind, the automobile became comfortable to use for ordinary people, rather than a hobbyist's plaything. In other words, it wasn't a really big technical breakthrough that made the automobile industry economically successful, and it wasn't a technical innovation that made it acceptable for large groups of non-technical users - it was something that made the car easy to use for the average person.

The most important insight I think we've had today in the technology industry is that our computers are plenty capable enough technically; they're just so damned hard to use that they're infuriating! I've been using these machines since 1970-something - before my kids were born, and they're 22 and 20 now. I used to think that every good software development kit had a soldering iron in it. But even I can't do that anymore. If I install some new software application, or some Microsoft upgrade, or a new system utility on one of my machines, everything breaks for weeks. I just can't stand it.

We cannot have that if we hope to take the industry to the next stage. The most important thing we have to understand about what will happen in the technology industry is that we will be successful only when we stop designing things for engineers - we have to start designing them for my mother.

I started taking PCs home to my mother about ten years ago. I set the first one up for her, so she could do e-mail with her six kids - I got her a PC, a modem, an ISP connection, and the right software, and made sure it worked, showing her how to use it to send e-mail. She was delighted. But after a few days or a couple of weeks, I'd stop getting e-mail from her, and when I'd go back to visit, every two or three months, the thing was out in the garage. "What's the problem?" I'd ask. "Well, I was using it just like you said, and I got this blue screen, and something said I had a 'fatal error,' so I figured it was dead, and I put it away." All she knew was that it didn't work anymore, and she didn't have a clue how to fix it. She couldn't use it. The instruction manuals were useless - they were a foreign language to her and didn't tell her what she needed to know to bring the machine back to life. "I can't even understand the Table of Contents or the Index," she said. "How can I figure out what to do?" And it's not that she's stupid; she's just the way everyone else in the world is, except the handful of us who are basically geeks.

When my son was about 13, it was time for him to go out and get his own first software program, one that he would buy with his own money, so I took him down to the software store for what turned into a two-hour session. He had to look at every box in the store, of course, all the games, and then he bought the one he liked best. He brought it home and put the disk in the drive (this was in the days before CDs). There was a great big, slick manual in the fancy box, and it immediately went over his shoulder into the pile of blue jeans and t-shirts, never to be seen again, and he started hammering on the mouse. I said, "Don't you want to read the instructions?" And he said, "Dad, instructions are for wimps." And he was right. That's what people do. If you can't figure it out by looking at it, you're not going to fool with it, and that's the most important lesson for technologists and engineers to learn. Even online instructions are a mistake - making instructions and help files more accessible is dead wrong; what we need to do is make them unnecessary.

I was riding in an airplane a few years ago and saw what was probably the single most important instruction guide I've ever seen - I understood what this industry's problem was in a heartbeat. I was on a flight to Europe, where they pass out those little foil-wrapped packages of lotion-saturated tissues to clean your hands with after a meal. This one was called a Wet-Nap. As I was fumbling with it, I saw the directions, which read, in their entirety, "Directions for use: Open and use." That's it. Open and use. No other instructions necessary. If we could get this Wet-Nap interface into what we do technologically, we would be winners. Almost all the innovation and brain power that will be applied successfully in the next three to five years in this industry will be used to close the gap between what technology can do and what people want it to do, and to making it easy, which is to say obvious, to use.