Why I disabled the water tap at our Amsterdam office for 2 weeks.
In 20 years, kids will learn how to raise a pet and a digital assistant. They won’t understand the necessity for a light switch and why their parents are still so nostalgic about them.
Don’t blame their parents though, they have lots of experience with so called “bullshit buttons”
They will live in a world where machine learning is omnipresent and play with it to discover new unexpected ‘functional’ features. Just how, as a kid, you discovered that a chair is a perfect pillar for your badass shelter. Kids having a (playful) conversation with the lights is the new normal, no longer a ‘smart’ feature. Their world will be filled with products that have been around for many years but now include some form of intelligence. I call those smarter dumb products.
Feature creep
We all know products that have become too complicated, too smart for their own good. For a long time, I’ve been wondering how those products made it to production. Now I realize that their added smart features do serve a certain benefit, they honestly try to solve a problem someone, somewhere experiences. But technology hasn’t progressed far enough yet that those features and technologies work flawlessly by themselves, which means they need a backup. This can come from good design or, less preferable, an extensive manual. The manual means that the technology requires the user to perform a certain trick. And that is exactly where it goes wrong, they fail in serving the most important technology around: the human being. So we end up with a ‘smart’ product which definitely needs a manual to teach the user certain tricks, when we all know: users don’t read manuals.
“The only technology I care about is the human being, and then everything else has to serve that.” Bill Buxton
That’s not the only problem with ‘smart’ products. Quite often some sort of intelligence is added to a product in order to make it smart. Just adding this intelligence isn’t sufficient, proper communication of the logic is needed as well, otherwise, users are unable to understand why a certain function is working one time while it fails the next time.
This means we end up with ‘smart’ products containing functionalities we don’t use because we needed to learn stupid tricks and when we do want to use them we don’t understand them because there is no visible logic.
How can we design smarter products that serve humans?
1. Enable people to update their mental models.
As a kid, you’ve played with products and discovered that a chair has many use cases. This play creates a mental model of a product. A mental model makes the product predictable, providing a sense of being in control. In order for humans to create a mental model they need to be able to understand cause-effect and feel empowered to explore the functionalities. When adding new functionalities to a product there needs to be a safe environment in which people can play with those functionalities in order for them to update their mental model.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
2. Use the full capabilities of human bodies
Humans move, sometimes in clumsy ways, often in pure harmony with the products they use. Have a look at the choreography of movements you make when entering the bathroom, a twist of the wrist, turn the body, flip the light switch, pull down and sit down, all in one fluent movement. Try teaching this to a robot. Dumb products are build for our bodies. But more often than not we see smarter products that remove physical interfaces and slap on a simple touch screen. We need to build smarter products in such a way that we can combine digital interfaces with physical interactions. This way we can use our muscle memory to decrease the cognitive load required to perform everyday tasks.
3. Products and people are slowly replaced over time
A new smarter product is often sold with the perfect ecosystem in mind, but no one has this perfect ecosystem. We simply don’t replace all of our products every two years, luckily. Therefore, a new product has to play nicely with the older products it is surrounded with. The same is true for who is going to use the product, shared products in your household will be used by many types of people. Ranging from your little kid to grandma. Smarter products need to, at least partly, accommodate to the mental models of those wide range of users.