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Techno dummies need not suffer in silence

By Philip Marchand

Originally appeared in The Toronto Star

You know how this happens. You're filling out a questionnaire and when you get to the last line you discover that you should have started by writing above the first line, or below the first line, as the case may be, and you did the opposite, so you've screwed the whole thing up. What an idiot you are.

Kim Vicente is here to tell you that you are not an idiot. You are also not an idiot because you never figured out how to stop the flashing clock on your VCR, or how to open a wine bottle with that new-fangled corkscrew that was supposed to make it easy.

"First people feel relieved because they realize, `It's not just me,'" Vicente says of audiences he's spoken to. "The second thing they want to tell you all about is all the things they have at home that frustrate them. It's like a therapy session."

Dr. Vicente understands. He's not a shrink exactly, but something equally if not more helpful to the bruised of soul, a "human factors engineer." He teaches his brand of engineering at the University of Toronto, and he's just published a book entitled The Human Factor: Revolutionizing The Way People Live With Technology, an argument for making technology work for human beings instead of driving them crazy. The basic premise is that if you have been defeated by technology, it's not your fault. A questionnaire is a piece of technology just as much as a light bulb or a steam engine. If you couldn't figure out which line to write on, it's because the questionnaire was badly designed.

This does not mean there was an obvious flaw in the layout of the questionnaire, any more than there was an obvious flaw in the butterfly ballot that confused voters in Florida in the last U.S. presidential election. Vicente is not talking about technology that simply does not work or is obviously irrational. He's talking about technology that works on its own terms but is overly complicated for the user, or counterintuitive, or uncomfortable.

The problem is, there are two categories of people in this world: One consists of people who regard owners' manuals the way they used to regard trigonometry exams in high school. The other category, much smaller, consists of people who like to read owners' manuals. In this latter category are those who design our gadgets, and can't understand why the rest of us don't enjoy solving mechanical puzzles. They design things because they can, regardless of any need or use for them.

That's the reason we have, on one end of the scale, things like nuclear power, and, on the other, electric toothbrushes. This is also why we have things that are useful, but annoying in practice, like those paper-towel dispensers in washrooms. They work fine if a part of the towel is hanging below the opening, but if it's stuck you have to jam your fingers into that narrow opening and try to pull out the towel. It makes you feel you have all the dexterity of a gorilla trying to gift-wrap a Christmas parcel.

Vicente's book is full of examples of technology gone wrong. There's the dashboard console of the BMW 7 Series, "iDrive," which offered something like 700 or 800 features.

"Granted, a great deal of scientific and engineering knowledge was required to pull it off," Vicente writes. "But the BMW 7 Series is a car, not a spaceship." He quotes an article in Car And Driver magazine that stated, "One of our senior editors needed 10 minutes just to figure out how to start it."

Computers, of course, offer a rich field of exasperating technology. May I vent about my own computer? Quite frequently, for no reason at all — do you understand, reader? FOR NO REASON AT ALL — a square will pop up on my screen with this message: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." It does this so often I'm beginning to wonder when the RCMP is going to surround my house: "Make it easy for yourself, Phil. Drop that keyboard and walk out slowly with your hands up."

"Oh yeah, come and get me, coppers!"

If this square has to keep popping up, I don't see why the computer people can't at least remove that offensive and guilt-inducing message and say something like: "Oops. Something's gone wrong. Perhaps you inadvertently touched the wrong command. Or perhaps it's our fault. Perhaps Old Mrs. Motherboard is feeling cranky today. Whatever. Let's take a second to chill, and try again, shall we?"

What do these people care about our feelings? They just want to sell us gadgets, and more gadgets. How else to explain the existence of Palm handheld computers? Actually, Vicente thinks the Palm is well-designed and relatively simple in its operation, and no doubt it is. I still can't figure out what huge advantage it has over the appointment book, however, and I'm happy to learn it's showing every sign of becoming a diminishing fad, like instant messaging on computers. Remember that breakthrough in human communication? It's clear now the feature is used only by bored and restless teenagers, chatting with their friends on the next block.

Bored and restless teenagers also help to keep the cellphone companies profitable, which leads me to another rant. I used to be merely annoyed at cellphone users. Someone once remarked that talking on cellphones is like picking your nose — okay if you do it in private. Unfortunately, the truth of that remark has escaped a huge section of the populace, so that every time you're in a public space — a store, a streetcar, a sidewalk, a park — you're in danger of hearing somebody else's loud conversation. It gives you a feeling of being in the company of weird quasi-humans — their bodies are sharing the same space as you, but their minds are aggressively elsewhere, forging invisible links with other quasi-humans.

I can just see Dr. Vicente telling me to relax, breathe deeply, it's not that bad, we have to be a bit broad-minded in our acceptance of technology as well as critical. And I agree. But before I leave the subject, let me mention one more downside of cellphone technology, which I think Vicente would acknowledge as well. In many parts of the United States it is now virtually impossible to make a long-distance call without using a cellphone. I've spent a lot of time in phone booths desperately pleading with operators, offering to use calling cards and credit cards of every description in order to get a call through to Toronto. No dice.

That might not be so bad — I can use a cellphone if necessary — except cellphone companies often tack on "roaming charges" for long distance calls that are pure extortion. This is highly annoying. It is also a reminder that every new technology ends up costing its users time and money. (Computers, for example, require people to work harder and longer.) This is something worth remembering when the next big thing comes rolling along.