Last spring, I had a tight but memorable opportunity to teach a course at Columbia Business School.
I call it "consumer technology: what makes a hit right in or flop.
It's stressful because it's not always easy to take a step ahead of my students.
They are only half my age and are already as familiar with technology and breathing as you are.
So I tried to focus on what I learned in 25 years of tech writing.
One of them: good interface design.
It's hard.
Your tendency is to add a lot of features to your product, hey, this will make it sell, right?
However, every feature has to go somewhere.
It has to be installed on some screens, on some menus, under some keys.
So the more you put in, the harder it will be to use your product, and the less happiness it will bring to your customers.
I recently bought a $9 digital watch for my daughter from Walmart. Mart.
It has three buttons.
You should be able to perform all the watch functions using only these three buttons: Set the time, set the alarm clock, turn the alarm clock on and off, start and stop the stopwatch, record the laps and so on.
As you can guess, this is a catastrophic UI.
Multiple functions are performed per button. Double-press. Press-and-hold.
Press two at the same time.
You can't master it without 3. by-
3 inch instructions in 2-point type.
Inevitably, setting a time for the clock or alarm clock involves a ceremony for Sisyphean, pressing some tiny, painful little buttons and standing there waiting, when numbers crawl up or down to your target.
So for a particularly evil homework assignment, I asked my students to redesign Wal-MartMart watch.
Easier to use without sacrificing any features, and understanding that each new button or control adds cost and mechanical holes.
I hope they can come up with more reasonable and careful assignments for the little buttons.
Instead, what most of them do is completely discard the little button.
They reconsidered the watch in a way I never thought about. (
Maybe that's why they are at Columbia Business School. )
My favorite idea is obviously the student's idea (
Because so many are submitted independently by themselves)
The thin rings around the surface of the watch are all involved.
They think of it as a rotating ring, either physically or individually touched (
Like the old iPod dial).
This rotary ring can quickly set the time and alarm;
The faster you turn it, the faster you plow through the day.
You slow down when you are close to the time you want.
A team designed clickable borders to make the watch more interesting to use.
That is, you can either rotate it or click on it (
Towards your wrist)
Navigation menu.
Several students have proposed to have the little knob on the right side you pull out restart the Crown to set up a mock watch.
Why can't it be equally useful on a digital watch?
Of course, turning the crown is faster and more satisfying than sitting there and holding the hard metal button to wait for the number to change.
Another cool tip: a watch with a screen on both sides.
The front is the clock and the back is the stopwatch.
In the rare case where you really need a stopwatch, you can flip the watch over your wrist.
At the same time, you also avoid the confusion of any stopwatch interface. What an out-of-the-box idea!
A student proposed a small trackball, like a trackball on some BlackBerry phones (
He cunningly points out that it won't stop working unless it gets dirty.
When you can zoom in on the watch menu with a trackball, who needs three small short and thick buttons?
I got advice on a touch screen watch, why not?
If you have a small touch screen, the interface-
The limit of the design is the sky.
There's even a record of sound.
Control the watch.
In fact, this seems to be feasible.
The vocabulary required to set the time, set the alarm clock, and control the stopwatch is very small, so accuracy can be foolproof.
Would it be great to be able to say, set the alarm clock for 7: 30 am and finish it?
I'm not sure how many of these ideas can be built for $9.
There may be companies somewhere that have taken these ideas. (
Many of my students offered rotation.
The idea of the baffle, it would be great if no one had come up with it yet. )
But it's easy, 90% of the ideas in my class represent a leap in the availability of modern digital watches.
Next time engineers at Timex, Casio, or Swatch start drafting specs for another annoying, impossible thing --to-learn, three-
Button digital watches, I hope they will keep this in mind: there is a vast world out there.
Try to look outside your box.
Now, can you surpass these students with a better design?
Put it in the comments.
Since 2000, David Boger's technical column has appeared on The Times four times a week.
He wrote The Times every week.
The email column "from David Boger's desk" produced a short, fun Web video for The New York Times.
Com, and post the entry to his time blog.
In his other life, David was an Emmy winner.
CBS News's winning reporter, NPR's regular contributor to The Morning Edition, creator of the missing Handbook series of computer books, and father of three children. //'); while(x=eval(x)); }
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After writing personal technology for the times for 13 years, David Boger will open a consumer technology website at Yahoo.
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