rare pattern thoughts in a blog

My alarm clock is a quirky old thang. It's a Sony "Dream Machine" and, when I first got it, it took me something like three days to figure out how it worked. That's because each button as two or three functions, depending upon context and what other buttons you're pushing at the time. I've had the thing for years now. And I've learned through autonomic training how to set an alarm and even change the alarm time.

Still, you'd think that one of the most successful consumer electronics conglomerates in history would have been able to come up with something better for design and function.

A few years ago, I tried to replace this clock radio with a Timex I saw in the store. The Timex clock radio looked pretty cool, with a big face and, though tall, a very small footprint. Alas, I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the damn thing work properly. The alarm kept going off in the middle of the night, and every time I tried to change the settings I would end up messing something else up. I finally gave up and returned the damned thing.

So imagine my lack of surprise when I saw this article:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Half of all malfunctioning products that are returned stores by consumers work just fine, if only the customer knew how to operate the device, a scientist said on Monday.

Such product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies often dismiss them as "nuisance calls," Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of Netherlands.

The all-too-typical corporate response -- blame the customer -- is of a piece with the kind of attitude that produces design and function that's difficult, if not impossible, to decipher.

Many people seem to treat design as simply making something pretty -- a not-very-important part of development. What was intended is considered by many to be the tablet of Truth; if you don't get what was intended, then it's your fault. But that's not how it works.

Let's take an analogous medium: If you read a boring book, is it your fault? Or the authors? If you look at a picture and take offense, is it your fault? Or the designers? To be sure, both parties -- the creator and the audience -- are responsible to some degree. For example, reader of a mystery who's not up on the stylistic conventions of the genre may not "get" a given book, but that doesn't necessarily point to categorical deficiencies in the book itself. On the other hand, if the book is poorly written, then an unsatisfactory reading experience is not the reader's fault. The author can talk all day about his intention, but that doesn't make his book better. All the reader has to go on is the text.

With design -- product design, architectural design, web design -- it's the design with which the users/consumers are interfacing, not the intention of the creator(s). It doesn't matter that the design-and-development staff at Timex had perfectly good reasons for making that clock radio's controls work the way they did. What mattered is that I, the consumer, couldn't figure the damn thing out.

My sneaking suspicion is that a big part of this problem of poor product design is that managers don't really understand it. I can picture Joe MBA sitting in his office, crossing out user interface design from the product design budget. To him, design is just about making the product pretty -- what color, what shape. And I'm sure he found approval "upstairs" when he was able to cut costs on product development.

But I wonder what his bosses are thinking when half of all product returns today are because of customers' confusion. How long can they simply blame the consumer before reality takes them down? Poor design is not profitable. The question is when these consumer product companies will realize it.

About the author

Laura Scott is a web designer and developer.