We like complexity?
Posted: March 1st, 2007 | 2 Comments »Speaking with Fabien about my Geoware presentation, one the issue I raised is that some mobile social software have an intrinsic complexity that make them unusable. For example, this crazy project by Honda makes me utterly skeptic. I don’t know whether it’s a east-asian thing but there seem to be a tendancy towards complexity here (and yes I know Honda is japanese).
This eventually leads to a paper by Don Norman that state how cluttered asian interface are perceived as powerful application. Some excerpts:
“I recently toured a department store in South Korea. (…) I found the traditional “white goods” most interesting: Refrigerators and washing machines. The store obviously had the Korean companies LG and Samsung, but also GE, Braun, and Philips. The Korean products seemed more complex than the non-Korean ones, even though the specifications and prices were essentially identical. “Why?” I asked my two guides, both of whom were usability professionals. “Because Koreans like things to look complex,” they responded. It is a symbol: it shows their status.
But while at the store, I marveled at the advance complexities of all appliances, especially ones that once upon a time were quite simple: for example, toasters, refrigerators, and coffee makers, all of which had multiple control dials, multiple LCD displays, and a complexity that defied description.”
SO what’s Norman’s lesson?
“Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?
Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.”
And, as he explains we do not have to go to Korea or Iran to find this tendancy, we can find it everywhere.
Why do I blog this? What is interesting is that Norman is a “less is more” person so he cannot really be challenged on that topic (though some readers took the piss and harshly complained):
“I am not advocating bad design. I am simply pointing out a fact of life: purchasers, on the whole, prefer more powerful devices to less powerful ones. They equate the apparent simplicity of the controls with lack of power: complexity with power”
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They equate the apparent simplicity of the controls with lack of power: complexity with power.
This is a really good point, and one that’s terribly frustrating for anyone in UX who’s exposed to what happens when the manifest complexity winds up confounding people. They buy the appearance of Power, and wind up disempowered. (I was once told in so many words that this is precisely why Korean customers prefer blinkenlights-bedizened slabs of plastic to the cool, clean Apple PowerBook. Never mind the idiosyncracies of the Korean application market.)
As sad as it is, what I really appreciate about Norman’s stance here is that it begins to unpack the affective and social “affordances” driving the acquisition and display of a given product from the actual ones germane to its use. (Contemplate the meaning of this “smart home” display, which is very likely to be too complicated for more than the merest wedge of its functionality to be invoked in everyday life, but which certainly looks impressive.)
Especially in hyper-status-conscious societies like Korea, a deep understanding of both aspects is probably going to be necessary to the overall success of a proposition.
I don’t know if you bother, but it’s a bit the same in the media.
Being a radio-journalist, I have to talk about difficult things (science) in the most understandable way. Besides that it is hard to explain difficult topics, you should also not oversimplify.
So sometimes I just talk non-simplifying about a certain aspect of a difficult topic, knowing that most of the listeners will probably not understand. But I think the part of the topic they don’t get gives them the feeling to listen to an intelligent emission.
Of course it is wrong to talk about a topic in a way nothing is understandable. But parts of it can be complex. Also the complex washing-machines are usable in the end.