Mark Gimein has a guest commentary on Gizmodo on different sorts of logic in system design:
It sounds great, but there's a problem here: it's that, in fact, lots of gadgets are designed with elegance and logic in mind. It's just that people aren't. People work in funny ways, and some of the ways of doing things that they like most are exactly the ones that don't make sense.
Take the ubiquitous hierarchical menus of the digital camera world. God knows how much effort has been devoted to putting together just the right sequence of menu presses, organized with Dewey decimal clarity and maximum button placement economy.
Gimein separates "logical" design from "intuitive" design, using a Pentax ZX-5n film camera that combine autofocus features with a design drawn directly from older manual-focus cameras. He then contrasts the features of that camera, which include dedicated dials for aperature, shutter speed, and exposure compensation, to modern cameras that bury such features in hierarchical menus. In modern cameras, the result is a clean and simple physical exterior with relatively non-intuitive workings. (A similar trend has afflicted video cameras, with many functions that used to be controlled by exterior dials and buttons now migrated into the flip-out lcd viewers. I can tell you from experience that in terms of usability, that migration was a big step backward.)
I'd argue those are simply different sorts of logic and simplicity. The "one-feature = one control" logic of older cameras probably works better for most users (especially those familiar with manual focus cameras) because it centers on specific activities at the surface level. Modern cameras (and hierarchical interfaces) are driven by a logic that attempts to combine all features into a more flexible software interface that can handle everything. But as most users have found out, a hierarchical interface ends up being overloaded.
One notable benefit of the hierarchical, software interface is primarily in terms of product development lifecycles: It's cheaper to upgrade software to add new features than it is to retool the physical production of the camera housing to add new buttons or dials. So even if that economy comes at the cost of usability, manufacturers are going to continue working in that direction. User/activity logic and simplicity competes with system logic and simplicity (and production cost). Like most tech trends, there's often a long shift toward lower quality and usability that's supposedly compensated for by lower price. The trick is for designers to aggressively begin re-integrating older, highly usable features (and increased quality, such as resolution) into successive iterations of the new design.
[ia Gizmodo]
Posted by johndanseven at August 10, 2005 10:10 AM