There’s something that’s been bugging me for the last few months and I think I understand it now.
Resistance to disruptive technologies is common. But why can’t we see progress more clearly? Paraphrasing a million conversations going on in 2011:
“Kindles are nice, but I’d never get one as I like the feel of a book in my hand.”
Then 6 months later:
“Kindles are so easy. I can’t believe I used to carry a heavy book to work every day.”
Or a argument conversation with my brothers a while back about personal interaction in shopping; they argued strongly that people like, no, expect and demand personal interaction with a shopping assistant in supermarkets. But themselves, given the choice, both use the impersonal bleeping, touch screens of automated checkouts. Because it’s quicker.
Despite what we might think, speed trumps personal service, convenient form factors trump pleasing physicality.
It was too long ago for me, but I imagine there where the same stuckist arguments about vinyl and CDs. There certainly were about film cameras and digital cameras; digital would never be able to replace film—it just doesn’t have the same ‘grain’ as real film. But 15 years later, it turns out that the grain that some photographers took so much care over in their darkrooms was entirely unconnected to taking great photographs.
This kind of resistance is common. I imagine we’ve all had it some form or another. The reason is that we confuse incidental attributes of the current technology with being qualities essential to the experience. It’s not that we just don’t like change but we think the change will diminish our experience by removing things we feel are important. It takes some time for us to understand what our basic needs are and separate them from an entrenched technology.
The longer a technology has been around the more likely it is for its users to conflate their needs with attributes of that technology. The groove in the vinyl was high quality music. Turning a page was reading. A friendly chat with your local grocer was shopping. These are things that had no alternative for generations, so they became entrenched; they became part of how we understood what we needed.
So what?
A fair question I suppose, but not what I was hoping for when all I asked for was some proof reading. So this:
- An appreciation of this will allow us to design better solutions for encouraging people to adopt new technologies or designs.
- Challenging ourselves to guess what tomorrow might strip from our designs and experiences might lead to better, simpler, longer lasting designs. Which parts of our designs will be rendered quaint and unnecessary in a few years?
- It also goes some way to explain skeuomorphic designs. Maybe some (bad) designers feel that faking the attributes of the old technology will allay user’s doubts about the change. (I don’t believe users are that gullible and I’m sure people would be better served by designs that highlight the benefits of the new technology by being “authentically digital”.)
- I’m going to guess that it’s these discarded attributes of technology that we once thought so essential that go on to fuel nostalgia. The discarded attributes are nice—physical objects are nice but, as it turns out, just not as nice as having easy access from hard drive, a friendly chat is nice but not as nice as shorter queues. So tapping into this historic but orphaned niceness makes sense if you want to evoke past experiences of technology. (For digital products I’m not sure that there’s a difference between skeuomorphism and nostalgia.)
Crystal ball gazing
So what are the things we think we can’t live without but are really just attributes of current tech? I’m no futurologist, but here are some not very profound or original ideas from the top of my head:
- Browsers? I’m sure how we access the web will be radically different in a few years and I’m not sure browsers will survive.
- Email? I hope so anyway.
- Telephone numbers are beginning to go away but not fast enough.
- Mobile phones? One day soon we’ll give up the pretence that mobiles are still phones.
- Car steering wheels? Self-driving cars are making fast progress.
Does this make any sense? What would you add to the list?
