Design Matters

I recently drove by a local lumber yard while on a weekend motorcycle outing and witnessed one of the saddest architectural statements I have seen in years. Stuck to the front of a warehouse style metal structure was a ridiculously stylized southern colonial facade. It looked as though two buildings were unceremoniously sawed in half and fused together with no respect paid to either party. There was clearly no attempt to blend or transition the joining. Dr. Frankenstein would be very proud of this one. It makes me wonder how such a thing could have been created. Did an architect actually think this one up? I’m guessing not. The architect was more likely asked to design the building with the warmth of a fine colonial, but on a prefab metal building budget. This is where the impossible task comes in.

Great design is generally not made by magically blending two totally dissimilar concepts or styles. This is where keen design leadership skill is required to sell the client on what the real problem is and what it is not. A well armed designer can clearly  address the budget issues faced by the client,  but they must not lose sight of the final design result.  Designers need to recognize this dileama and avoid painful design operations like this one. I’m sure it would have been possible to design a pure metal building with a more human or warm quality and stayed within budget. I don’t think anyone is really fooled by this design facade.

David Hill

Enough suspense, it’s time to reveal what this thing really does. There were lots of very creative and humorous attempts, a few actually got pretty close. The machine was created, notice I did not use the term designed, to cut grooves in concrete so that a fresh layer of blacktop adheres properly. Imagine a few dozen diamond crusted blades spinning wildly as the concrete dust is flying. I’m sure the sound must have been deafening as it crawled down the highway at speeds of close to 1 MPH. The racing steering wheel makes so much sense now doesn’t it? The company would nearly give the beast away if you signed up to buy the blades from them. If you have ever purchased a diamond encrusted cutting blade, or anything else for that matter, you understand this business model perfectly. Glad you enjoyed the story about this one from my archives.

David Hill

I’m a designer who lives by the credo that great design blurs the boundries between form and function. In a perfect world they support each other in a synergistic way so strongly that they are nearly impossible to separate without destroying the design. Interesting that Sapper spoke on a similar topic in his recent video I posted. Over the years I have accumulated quite a stockpile of things that exemplify this concept. I’ve blogged about many of them here on Design Matters.

Unfortunately, I have also seen many things that tilt the balance to the extreme of either pure form or pure function. Each of these gives either the design or the engineering disciplines a black eye. Designers who seek pure form can be seen as artsy beret wearing types who would readily endure sitting in an uncomfortable chair as long as it looked avant garde. Engineers conversely can be seen as robotic calculator slinging nerds who think an abandoned wooden spool would make a great coffee table .

I once was involved with a client at the design consulting firm I worked at years ago that probably created the most extreme example of pure function I have ever seen. I have carted around a well worn product shot of this machine in my personal archive for more than 25 years. I occassionaly like to break it out to illustrate exactly what I mean by pure function. It never fails to raise an eyebrow or evoke a laugh. It is so amazing that few have ever been able to guess what it actually is or does. I must admit that was my immediate reaction when I first saw it. So here it is.

Imagine being part of the design team asked to make it ” look pretty”. I think my first comment was ” nice racing steering wheel, it must really go fast”. It’s easy to imagine Willy Wonka at the wheel with puffs of colored smoke belching out of the smoke stacks as bits of candy pop out onto a conveyor belt. How can you possibly design something if you can’t even determine what it is or does? The engineering team had an arguement to rationalize the existence of every belt, cog, wheel, pulley, or bolt . They even had a reason for the steering wheel selection. The problem was that nobody could explain to us how a person would ever use it. Every decision had been made based on shortest hydraulic lines, fewest bolts, welds, or off the shelf objects. Some of the lever handles were even made from the steel punch outs for the gauges on the control panel. “Why waste them” was the engineers explanation. We were expected to bend a few slabs of sheet metal around it and make it instantly beautiful.

Fortunately for me I moved on to another company. My former colleagues were faced with the nightmare of trying to make this into something. In the end all they could do was specify a new color that looked a bit less like Smurf blue, and apply some extra large graphics to draw your attention away from visual disarray. Maybe you can guess what it does?

David Hill

Not too long ago, my colleague Matt Kohut talked about the infamous Forward and Back browser keys. These of course offer convenient access to the Forward and Back functions in your browser, and also function similarly while browsing a folder in Windows. Their inclusion has been a topic of some debate, as some people love them and others hate them.

We first introduced these keys on the ThinkPad i Series, and spread them to the rest of the ThinkPad lineup at the time. This change was prompted by a study we did looking at adding internet centric features for desktops and notebooks. It tested very positively in user research sessions as a quick way to retrace your path through the internet.

Given their close proximity to the arrow keys, it is no surprise some people accidentally press the forward/back keys instead of an arrow. This is a particular pain if you’re entering text into a web browser, say for a blog or discussion forum. More often than not, your content is lost (depending on the browser) and you’re left cursing. If this issue befalls you too often, rest assured that there is a way to turn the keys off.

You’ll need to have the Lenovo utility “Keyboard Customizer” installed, either available through our website or using your System Update tool. Run this program and go to the “Key Sensitivity” tab. Towards the bottom, you will see the options for the Browser keys, including a checkbox to enable/disable them.

Above is an example of another implementation of the Forward & Back keys, shown on a desktop keyboard we offer. As you can tell, they are on the upper left hand side of the keyboard and out of the way of accidental pressing compared to the ThinkPad implementation. The interesting thing about this location is that you can keep your right hand on the mouse and use your left hand to navigate back/forward in your browser.

What if we offered something similar on our notebooks? If we placed a pair of back/forward keys towards the upper left of the keyboard, users could keep their right hand on the TrackPoint or mouse and easily navigate back/forward using their left hand.

Let me know what you think in the poll I have setup, at the bottom left corner of the blog.

David Hill

World Usability Day 2006

Just found out about this. 

Bad design can happen for a lot of different  reasons. Insufficient time to create the solution, poor market understanding, bad engineering or even bad designers can all lead up to delivering a design disaster. How many times have you seen a product that leaves you wondering, why would anyone buy that? Did you ever see the handheld  appliance that shot molten butter out a brush like nozzel for buttering up a slice of toast? Can you imagine how long it would take to clean this marvel of innovation compared to a simple butter knife? Trust me, the best design in the world can't save these doomed ideas from late night TV liquidations, flea markets, or ultimately the land fill. Gadgets, gizmos, and novelties aren't, however, the only things that suffer from this dilema. Even the highly successful VCR was the victim of one of my favorites, "feature over function". Remember the famous blinking 12:00 on your VCR?  I never even tried to set the clock on the last one I bought. Rich with time shifting record features and other technical complexities, the VCR was in reality used primarily to play rented video tapes. How simple could that have been? Was it worth wading through thick user manuals and frustrating menus just to tape your favorite Gilligan's Island episode scheduled for 9:00 PM next Sunday? You know, the one where they almost get off the island but Gilligan messes things up at the last minute.

There is a great lesson to be learned here for the design of computers. As designers we need to challenge feature creep and turn our focus on what people actually want to do. Don't get me wrong, not all features are bad. They just need to be the right ones and be easy to use. I really don't want to worry about my computer and another 75 useless and frustrating features, I have far more interesting things to consider.

This is one of my favorite websites on the topic of bad design:

http://www.baddesigns.com/

 David Hill