Stupid designers

I learned how to program radio station presets in my first car, a hand-me-down '73 Super Beetle, by looking at the manual. At the time the procedure was novel to me:

1. Tune in to the desired station.
2. Yank out a button under the radio dial.
3. Plunge it back as far as it would go.

Preset accomplished. Coolness. And that's the way radios would be programmed for the next few years, at least in the old cars I could afford.

A few years later I was able to buy a nicer car. Oh, still it was used, yet less than a decade! It was a hot '92 convertible and it was fast, it was sexy, and it had an electronic stereo.

The sound system was an AM/FM/Cassette with a digital clock. Apparently that was a big deal in 1992. What few buttons it had were 'soft'; they had multiple functions depending on what mode the user was in. Once again, I turned to the manual. And once again I had to learn how to program presets.

Fast forward to 2003. Smelling a gas crisis, I bought a brand new 40 MPG Corolla 'Sport'. It came with a nicer sound system than any of my previous cars. But this time I didn't have to check the manual to program the radio. It was intuitive:

1. Tune the station.
2. Push and hold the button to assign the station.

Why push? Because there was no way to pull, yet the buttons were arranged under the radio dial. Why hold? Because if I held a button, it beeped. And there were separate buttons for the clock. Separate buttons for the CD. And separate buttons for the cassette. None of this "one button, two dozen functions." Hallelujah! Somebody gets me!

You see, I have a good deal of experience programming things, be they car radios, appliances or even computers. Yet almost every time I buy a new gadget to do the same old thing I am faced with challenges created by designers or engineers who have placed non-intuitive user interfaces in my way.

Granted, stuff changes. Yet classic design paradigms don't. If I buy a new recorder of whatever medium I can now record in, I should expect to be able to find the buttons to record, playback, stop, pause and fast-forward or reverse. Just as the paradigm of setting a preset on a car radio was almost exactly the same on an '03 Corolla as it was on a '73 VW. So why was it that all of the other cars that I owned in the intervening years always had a different way to set the radio?

I still have that Corolla. I've driven it through Southwest deserts and canyons, up and down the Rockies and the Appalachians, and through South Florida storms and traffic jams. It runs like the day I drove it off the lot. I guess the folks who designed and built the rest of the car were as smart as the ones who designed the radio.

If you are designing a user interface please remember one thing about the target audience: they learned how to do it once, they may be willing to learn a second time. Just please don't make them learn it over and over, again and again.

Peace out.