Mechanical-Age versus Information-Age Represented Models

We are experiencing an incredible transformation from the age of industrial, mechanical artifacts to an age of digital, information objects. The change has only begun, and the pace is accelerating rapidly. The upheaval that society underwent as a result of industrialization will likely be dwarfed by that associated with the information age.

Mechanical-age representations

It is only natural for us to try to draw the imagery and language of an earlier era that we are comfortable with into a new, less certain one. As the history of the industrial revolution shows, the fruits of new technology can often only be expressed at first with the language of an earlier technology. For example, we called railroad engines iron horses and automobiles were labeled horseless carriages. Unfortunately, this imagery and language colors our thinking more than we might admit.

Naturally, we tend to use old representations in our new environments. Sometimes, the usage is valid because the function is identical, even if the underpinning technology is different. For example, when we translate the process of typewriting with a typewriter into word processing on a computer, we are using a mechanical-age representation of a common task. Typewriters used little metal tabs to slew the carriage rapidly over several spaces until it came to rest on a particular column. The process, as a natural outgrowth of the technology, was called tabbing or setting tabs. Word processors also have tabs because their function is the same; whether you are working on paper rolled around a platen or on images on a video screen, you need to rapidly slew to a particular margin offset.

Sometimes, however, mechanical-age representations shouldn't be translated verbatim into the digital world. We don't use reins to steer our cars, or a tiller, although both of these were tried in the early days of autos. It took many years to develop a steering idiom that was appropriate for the car. In word processors, we don't need to load a new blank page after we fill the previous one; rather the document scrolls continuously, with visual markers for page breaks.

New technology demands new representations

Sometimes tasks, processes, concepts, and even goals arise solely because new technology makes them possible for the first time. With no reason to exist beforehand, they were not conceived of in advance. When the telephone was first invented, for example, it was, among other things, touted as a means to broadcast music and news, although it was personal communication that became the most popular and widely developed. Nobody at the time would ever have conceived of the telephone as being a ubiquitous personal object that people would carry in their pockets and purses and that would ring annoyingly in the midst of theater performances.

With our mechanical-age mindset, we have a hard time seeing appropriate information-age representations—at first. The real advantages of the software products that we create often remain invisible until they have a sizable population of users. For example, the real advantage of e-mail isn't simply that it's faster than postal mail—the mechanical-age view, but rather that it promotes the flattening and democratization of the modern business organization—the information-age advantage. The real advantage of the Web isn't cheaper and more-efficient communication and distribution—the mechanical age view. Instead, it is the creation of virtual communities—the information-age advantage that was revealed only after it materialized in our grasp. Because we have a hard time seeing how digital products will be used, we tend to rely too much on representations from the past, mechanical age.

Mechanical-age representations degrade user interaction

We encounter a problem when we bring our familiar mechanical-age representations over to the computer. Simply put, mechanical-age processes and representations tend to degrade user interactions in information-age products. Mechanical procedures are easier by hand than they are with computers. For example, typing an individual address on an envelope using a computer requires significant overhead compared to addressing the envelope with pen and ink (although the former might look neater). The situation improves only if the process is automated for a large number of instances in batch—500 envelopes that you need to address.

As another example, take a contact list on a computer. If it is faithfully rendered on screen like a little bound book, it will be much more complex, inconvenient, and difficult to use than the physical address book. The physical address book, for example, stores names in alphabetical order by last name. But what if you want to find someone by her first name? The mechanical-age artifact doesn't help you: You have to scan the pages manually. So, too, does the faithfully replicated digital version: It can't search by first name either. The difference is that, on the computer screen, you lose many subtle visual cues offered by the paper-based book (bent page corners, penciled-in notes). Meanwhile, the scrollbars and dialog boxes are harder to use, harder to visualize, and harder to understand than simply flipping pages.

AXIOM 

Don't replicate mechanical age artifacts in interfaces without information-age enhancements.

Real-world mechanical systems have the strengths and weaknesses of their medium, such as pen and paper. Software has a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses, yet when mechanical representations are replicated without change, they combine the weaknesses of the old with the weaknesses of the new. In our address book example, the computer could easily search for an entry by first name; but, by storing the names in exactly the same way as the mechanical artifact, we deprive ourselves of new ways of searching. We limit ourselves in terms of capabilities possible in an information medium, without reaping any of the benefits of the original mechanical medium.

When designers rely on mechanical-age representations to guide them, they are blinded to the far greater potential of the computer to provide sophisticated information management in a better, albeit different, way.

Improving on mechanical-age representations: an example

Although new technologies can bring about entirely new concepts, they can also extend and build upon old concepts, allowing designers to take advantage of the power of the new technology on behalf of users through updated representations of their interface.

For example, take the calendar. In the nondigital world, calendars are made of paper and are usually divided up into a one-month-per-page format. This is a reasonable compromise based on the size of paper, file folders, briefcases, and desk drawers.

Programs with visual representations of calendars are quite common, and they almost always display one month at a time. Even if they can show more than one month, as Outlook does, they almost always display days in discrete one-month chunks. Why?

Paper calendars showed a single month because they were limited by the size of the paper, and a month was a convenient breaking point. Computer screens are not so constrained, but most designers copy the mechanical-age artifact faithfully (see Figure 2-3). On a computer, the calendar could easily be a continuously scrolling sequence of days, weeks, or months as shown in Figure 2-4. Scheduling something from August 28th to September 4th would be simple if weeks were contiguous instead of broken up by the arbitrary monthly division.

Figure 2-3: The ubiquitous calendar is so familiar that we rarely stop to apply information age sensibilities to its design on the screen. Calendars were originally designed to fit on stacked sheets of paper, not interactive digital displays. How would you redesign it? What aspects of the calendar are artifacts of its old, mechanical-age platform?

Figure 2-4: Scrolling is a very familiar idiom to computer users. Why not replace the page-oriented representation of a calendar with a scrolling representation to make it better? This perpetual calendar can do everything the old one can, and it also solves the mechanical-representation problem of scheduling across monthly boundaries. Don't drag old limitations onto new platforms out of habit. What other improvements can you think of?

Similarly, the grid pattern in digital calendars is almost always of a fixed size. Why couldn't the width of columns of days or the height of rows of weeks be adjustable like a spreadsheet? Certainly you'd want to adjust the sizes of your weekends to reflect their relative importance in relation to your weekdays. If you're a businessperson, your working-week calendar would demand more space than a vacation week. The idioms are as well known as spreadsheets—that is to say, universal—but the mechanical-age representations are so firmly entrenched that we rarely see software publishers deviate from it.

The designer of the software in Figure 2-3 probably thought of calendars as canonical objects that couldn't be altered from the familiar. Surprisingly, most time-management software handles time internally—in its implementation model—as a continuum, and only renders it as discrete months in its user interface—its represented model!

Some might counter that the one-month-per-page calendar is better because it is easily recognizable and familiar to users. However, the new model is not that different from the old model, except that it permits the users to easily do something they couldn't do easily before—schedule across monthly boundaries. People don't find it difficult to adapt to newer, more useful representations of familiar systems.

AXIOM 

Significant change must be significantly better.

Paper-style calendars in personal information managers (PIMs) and schedulers are mute testimony to how our language influences our designs. If we depend on words from the mechanical age, we will build software from the mechanical age. Better software is based on information-age thinking.