Technology doesn’t Work

I work in Paris, in a large converted telephone exchange where we have recently installed new light switches that save energy by turning off when they don’t detect movement. When you go to the loo, you don’t move much, you might move bits of you, or you might grimace a bit, but it’s not movement as such, certainly not detectable by the infra red monitor. So after 20 seconds, the light goes off.

Someone, somewhere, made the decision that after 20 seconds the light would go off. It might have been the facilities manager. It was more likely the person who set the default, probably the kind hearted engineer who programmed these switches. He (and it was almost certainly a He) went home feeling good. He may have even told his kids that he had saved the world a few kilowatts, that he was doing his bit against George Bush (especially if he was French), and felt happy and satisfied when he went to sleep that night.

But the experience I am having of his decision is that I am sitting on a loo in a foreign country waving my arms about because I think there is probably a sensor somewhere, if only I could see it, which will eventually see me and turn the light back on.

As a designer, I am very used to people thinking that design is somewhere between Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, James Dyson, Jonathan Ive and Stella McCartney. But for me, the decision of that coder, software engineer, engineer, whoever, was a design decision. That person made a decision, based on an assumption that led to a human experience. An experience consists of functional end emotional components, form and function, satisfaction and delight. And the result of this particular decision is that I am flaying around in the darkness hoping the light will come back on.

Equivalent examples exist all around us and are surely familiar to us all. Working in the mobile phone industry as I do, the successful delivery of technical solutions to help people communicate means that these issues are important business issues, not just nice to haves.

I recently met a very senior head of a successful design agency. She is in her fifties, glamorous, patient, intelligent, an inspirational person. She was interested that I worked for a mobile phone company and told me that she had recently received a brand new phone, because she wanted to receive email on the move. Her first call was important, a conference-call with a major client. She tried to call the conference line, but was appalled that she could not work out how to use her new phone. She could not even make a basic call. In desperation she had to find a public phone box, which was of course unpleasant and stank. This successful, intelligent person had to hold the hour long conference call in a smelly public phone box because her mobile phone, with more technology in it than the average 70’s space program was so unintuitive that it was impossible to understand how to make a call.

She was embarrassed to tell me this story, feeling it was her fault, her inability to get to terms with modern technology that was the problem. It was not. This is the ultimate insult, they get it wrong and then make it feel like it’s our fault!

For all the technology lovers out there and the kids who can do it all, it’s easy to forget that too many times technology does not work. I sometimes think that technology never works. It might work in the technical sense, but one part of it will not, and the whole experience will be one of frustration or even failure.

People will work it out, they’ll get used to it, we hope. Well I don’t agree, that’s a very risky thing to say. With huge investments in technology, having an attitude of fingers crossed and hope they’ll learn how to use it does not seem very sensible. I’m not overestimating the problem, even the mighty Nokia recently admitted at a usability conference that of the phones that get sent back, half have no technical faults and are sent back because people can’t use them.

To make matters worse, the mantra of Web 2.0 may well be about to make it worse.

Web services and developers, keen to proclaim their compliance with the softer, more user friendly, early adopter up approach described as Web 2.0, are keen to say “release it early, upgrade often, our users will tell us how to design it better!” No they, will go off and find something that actually works and is nicer to use. If web 2.0 is building itself on a platform that "it’s OK, all we have to do is listen to customers", then we are going to be in big trouble. Flickr may have got better over time, but it was good to start with, which is not true about an awful lot of web services I am seeing.

The most creativity I see in the web world at the moment is the creative reasoning to try and avoid having to design anything to be good in the first place. Businesses, services and technology developers go to extraordinary lengths to avoid asking people called designers to actually use their skill, their ability to comprehend emotional barriers, use intuitive insight and creativity, a strength which, I'm sorry to say, not everyone has, to our advantage.

Despite this being the generation of design, it is matched by the effort to ignore design and say that it is a niche activity that only Apple partake off and that is because they are weird and have a maverick boss.

Wrong, we should be careful not to ignore one of the smartest tools in the box that we've ever had. The ability to put art and science together, the desire to make functional elements around us work and be beautiful at the same time. It’s what we do. We do it with words and we make drama. We do it with graphics, materials, technology, industrial processes. It’s called design. It’s what we’ve been doing since the Greeks started caring about the shape and decoration of the clay pots they put wine into.

Design is not just visual, it’s the decisions that people make, often with the best intention, but the worst impact. In a technology rich world, we need the design process more than ever. Understanding people's problem and desires, being creative and finding lots of solutions, testing with real people and great implementation to acheive functional and emotional satisfaction. Not just well meaning but flawed technologically biased decision makers who leave me here in this toilet waving my arms about…….