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| An | EDUCAUSE | publication | 
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| Talking
with Don Norman
Don Norman, self-described "technology enthusiast annoyed by the complexity of today's products," is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and a former executive at Apple Computer and Hewlett Packard. Through his company, the Nielsen Norman Group, he advocates human-centered designs that put the needs of people over technology. He is the author of The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the PC is so Complex, and Information Appliances are the Answer. ER: What marks would you give today's computers for ease-of-use? DON NORMAN: I've been collecting information about the complexity of today's systems. One of my favorite statistics is the number of feet dedicated in bookstores to books for "dummies" -- Windows for Dummies, This for Dummies, That for Dummies, and so on. The most recent addition to my collection of complexity paraphernalia is a catalogue from a teaching company that sells videotapes that teach you how to use this or that program or device. The instructions for Microsoft Word took 10 hours of tapes. That seems 10 times too long. But when you start getting into the intricacies and the subtleties and, of course, the problems that arise, then maybe there is no number of hours that will suffice. The truth is that we shouldn't have to learn all of the shortcut keys or all the workarounds or all the things to do when, for obscure reasons, your machine freezes or what have you. That has nothing to do with fundamental principles of computing. That has to do with programming errors. There is no reason why I should spend so many hours learning because of programming error. ER: What about the addition of features that are, presumably, welcomed by the buying public? NORMAN: Features give rise to a complex problem. Many of the features in a program like Photoshop, which is aimed at highly skilled professionals, are indeed necessary and desirable. But the same story does not hold for a program like Microsoft Word, where many of the features are put in largely for marketing reasons. I really fear that we have reached an explosion of featuritis, mainly as an attempt to cause people to upgrade from whatever version of software they own to the new version. The business model of the software companies is heavily centered around periodic upgrades. The only way to convince people to buy new copies is to convince them that you have features that they can not live without, even though they've lived without them up to now. A large amount of the proliferation of features is Mindless Marketing -- A Peculiar Business Model, and a lack of respect for the customer. ER: So how would you summarize the general state of affairs? NORMAN: I believe that the current PC has reached an unacceptable state of complexity and instability. A large amount of this complexity is due to its history. Many of today's programs are forced to add complexity because they must also deal with data that were produced by older programs. The PC itself must run older programs. The marketing strategy is to try to sell upgrades by adding new features. And on top of that, the attempt to have one machine solve the world's problems, be applicable to everybody in the world, no matter what language, what culture or what task they are trying to do, simply creates extreme complexity. I don't see any way out of this problem in today's world, because it is so essential that we maintain compatibility with our own past work and the work of the people that we collaborate with. Therefore I advocate a change, saying that maybe we can simply bypass the computer, have simpler devices, but devices that produce data that can be shared by everyone, much as on the Internet you don't know what kinds of computers or programs people have used to put together their documents. The Internet provides a universal language for sharing the data and information. That is the only way I see out of today's current problems. The solution will take the form of the "information appliance," which is a device aimed at helping you perform some activity where the emphasis in the design and on the device itself would be the kinds of activities being done, rather than today's on the technology itself. I would like for the technology to be invisible. ER: Why not just make general-purpose machines that are smaller and simpler? For example, what do you think of these small devices that use Windows CE? NORMAN: Take a system that is far too complex and difficult for everybody and make it smaller? It's not clear to me why that's any advantage. ER: Isn't it presumably simpler as well as smaller? NORMAN: If you actually talk to people who are using it, in every case where it's simpler, that's where the users are complaining. So the Windows CE machine doesn't run Microsoft Word or doesn't run a full version of Power Point or Presentations and so the people complain. They say, well, gee, I bought this lighter machine so I could travel with it and when I suddenly need to give a talk I discover I can't make up a new talk. I can only give old ones. No, the simplicity is illusory. As long as you try to do everything on the one machine, it has to be complex. On the other hand, there is one respect in which the Windows CE machine is superior. Because there was no requirement to support the legacy applications, the actual machine code could be written from scratch and could be written in a cleaner, neater way. So it is a superior operating system, but that does not solve the complexity problem. ER: Speaking of the complexity problem, how would you characterize the complexity found in an institution of higher learning? NORMAN: The university environment has always been a major challenge. Computer companies soon learn that the "educational market" is not a single market. It is, actually, a very complex set of markets. The simplest division is to say that the administrative side, where the university is much like any large company, has to worry about budget, personnel records, record-keeping in general. That's a part of the university that is very large and very necessary and one that is seldom visible to the faculty and students. There is a second kind of operations research aspect to the university, which is class scheduling and room allocation, and that is also a very complex problem associated with the registration of students and the maintenance of records. And that's only visible to faculty and students because they are always complaining about the way it works. But all of these are fairly straightforward, standard computational problems. That doesn't mean they are easy, but it means they fall within the range that normal, large-scale enterprise systems are built to handle. And these require centralized systems and centralized control. Then there are the systems that are used by the faculty and the students for a large number of purposes -- for their daily correspondence, for the writing of papers, for communication with others, more and more for handing out class assignments, for making class notes available to students, for students to do their homework, for students to contact other students to prepare their assignments and hand them in to the faculty. There, most individual faculty and students like to choose their own devices, which results in the problem of great heterogeneity and incompatibility of devices. The Internet is helping to ease that problem dramatically, but the Internet is plagued by a huge amount of security weaknesses, and unless you have very good security the educational system is going to suffer. ER: The bottom line? NORMAN: The bottom line is that these problems raise incredible complexities. It means that the central administration is responsible for the administrative side of the university plus maintaining the infrastructure, the networks on which everybody has come to rely more and more, networks connected to the outside world, networks that connect students and faculty to one another, the security aspects of the networks, firewalls that don't disrupt, and really good security when you are putting in examinations, test scores and answers to your assignments. So it is one of the more complex information technology environments I know of. ER: Let's take a specific example of administrative complexity. Suppose you were CIO at a college or university. Would you see the introduction of Macintoshes into a largely PC environment as something that results in undesirable complexity in the overall computing environment? Macintosh is used just as an example; it could be any machine or piece of software with relatively small market share. NORMAN: I personally don't believe introducing the Macintosh makes it any more complex. In many ways it simplifies life. The real question is whether you have true homogeneity in the machines you are supporting or do you have diversity? There's no question having homogeneity simplifies things -- simplifies things for the support staff and instructional staff. But homogeneity means real, complete homogeneity. It means everybody will be using, say, a Gateway Model 76243 with the same kinds of peripherals associated with it and with exactly the same software. As soon as you allow people to buy Gateway or Dell or Compaq or put together their own machine -- as soon as you allow this kind of diversity -- well, as soon as you allow machines of different ages and different configurations, then you already have this complexity. And, in my opinion, adding a Macintosh to the mix doesn't really increase the problem. ER: So diversity is sometimes good and sometimes bad? NORMAN: Here's my take on it. What are we talking about in a university? Are we talking about running the payroll system and giving each of the accounting offices and each of the university departments quick access to administration figures and budgets? If you are doing that then I think arguing for some kind of uniformity makes a good deal of sense. This is what I've said earlier. This is a traditional information technology problem. And the more homogeneous the better the service that we can provide. When we start talking about educational matters, however, then the story changes. You certainly wouldn't want to legislate to the computer science department that they could only teach Java as a programming language because after all it is the most modern and most elegant of the modern algebraic languages. That would be silly. It's very important that the faculty be allowed to experiment and be allowed to use a variety of things because in part it is related to their educational mission. So if you admit that the choice of some of these technologies is relevant to experimentation and education or research, you've got to allow Linux and a number of variations of Unix and so forth. Where the mission of the university is efficient administration, then I believe it makes really good sense to standardize. Where the mission of the university is education then it would in fact be wrong to standardize. The same way most universities would not standardize on the textbooks professors are required to use. The diversity comes at a cost but it adds to the strength of the university. ER: Well, how will we get to this next stage of personal computing -- the "information appliance" stage? NORMAN: It will creep up upon us. And the average user doesn't have to do anything. To some extent, we're already in it. Just slowly we will discover we are using more and more specialized devices that we have come to really like. As a result we will realize we are using our PCs less and less. The whole story may take 10 or 15 years to be completed. ER: But what is the underlying design problem in existing general-purpose computers? Is the problem of design largely reducible to the one insane yearning to put too much into any product? Is that the core of all these problems? That you try to do too much with the personal computer? NORMAN: No, I think the problem is different. The problem is that these products are designed by engineers. They are technology-driven. They are built to do things simply because those things can be done. They are not built with any understanding of the people that will be using them and what their needs are. This is often appropriate in the very early stages of a technology when nobody understands the technology or what to do with it. It is not appropriate to keep adding unnecessary things once real needs are known. What we need is a true human-centered development philosophy. ER: But what about these usability centers that companies have? What about all the talk over the last 10 years about so-called user-friendliness and how the designers would all be paying a lot of attention to that? What went wrong? NORMAN: Everybody pays a lot of attention to usability but nobody does anything about it. ER: Why not? NORMAN: It's like the weather. ER: Don't they put people on the problem, working to solve it? NORMAN: Nah. First of all, let me remind you, from the university point of view there are only three basic kinds of computer systems: There is Windows; there is Macintosh; there is Unix. Unix has always been done by the engineers and programmers for themselves. So Unix never has been very usable, though it happens not to be usable by ordinary people because it just wasn't designed for everyday people. So that "deficiency" may be excusable. Macintosh in many ways was designed in an attempt to make the computer truly usable. In the actual early days of the design there were people who were concerned about usability. The human interface group at Apple has always been very strong and been a part of the design cycle from the very beginning. And I think it does show -- Apple products are much easier to use than the Windows products. Windows, however, always has had this engineering mentality and, as you know, it started out with DOS and Windows was sort of built on top of DOS, which has added to its complexity. In the Windows environment there was a lot of user testing but it was always thrown in at the end. A company that is really proud of its user testing facilities is a company that's in trouble. You cannot put usability into a product by testing it in. It has to be fundamental in the design. Microsoft understood that the Macintosh was a superior system for the everyday person. They stated so publicly very early in the game. And they therefore attempted to bring out their own version -- namely, Windows. And it's very interesting how although on the surface Windows is very similar to the Mac, even though it is truly a copy, it has the details wrong. The group that put it together simply didn't understand the way people work. ER: Example? NORMAN: One of the simplest examples: in the Macintosh when you open up a directory and you get a listing of the files, you can say which way you'd like those files to be listed, showing as icons, as a list, as a set of details. You can say where it should occur on the screen and how big the window should be, and from then on, every time you open that directory, it always gives you what you asked for the last time. Not so in the Windows environment. Every time you open it up, it reverts to its own style, so you are forced to carefully change it, revise it and reposition it. And the next time you open it up, it's once again forgotten everything you've done. It's these details that make a huge difference to usability. Windows gets it wrong every time. I have a list of problems like this, places where the Mac does it correctly and Windows gets the details wrong (trying to change a file name, for example). ER: Yet Microsoft cares about usability, does it not? NORMAN: Absolutely. Microsoft has excellent usability experts. The problem is they are being called for too late in the design sequence. They are not being used properly. I find this true in most companies. Most companies pay lip service to usability, but when it comes right down to it, the usability experts are low in status, and usability groups are small and disorganized, disenfranchised, and called upon much too late in the process to make a difference. ER: What are the educational implications of what you are saying? NORMAN: Well, I can think of two things. One is in our general curriculum. I think it is important to add an information component that was not there before, an information and literacy component. This is not how to use the computer, but this is to understand the fundamental principles underlying digital information and communication systems, understand the fights about security and encryption, to understand what it means when the entire world is going to be so tightly interconnected. The second point you're raising is, I think, something that needs to be addressed in the engineering curriculum. It is time to have a change to emphasize design for people. And this is not just true in the computer science courses. It is true as well in mechanical engineering, for example, and in architecture, in civil engineering and electrical engineering, and in computer science. ER: And management? NORMAN: Yes, certainly it belongs in management departments. And the good news is that all of the areas I've mentioned, including management, are starting to hire people from the behavioral sciences and are starting to have courses on consumer behavior and users and design. The bad news is that oftentimes these are added with reluctance and are not really part of the core curriculum. Still, I see that has been changing. I can see it becoming part of the core curriculum, and that's what I would like to see. Of course one of the problems we face, especially in the engineering curriculum, is that over time as our technology evolves and new considerations arise, there is more and more pressure to add yet more and more to the classes, the curriculum, and it is not obvious how you can fit it into four years. ER: What would you like to do if you were given responsibility for a brand-new university or college? NORMAN: I think it is really important to separate the research function of the university from the educational function. As long as those are mixed, it is probably impossible to make a change. The prestige comes to the research side, and faculty like to be known by their fellow academics across the world. When all of that is happening it can conflict with the educational side of the university. So I would like to separate those two things and say that in my university we might have a research component, but there you are judged differently, you are paid differently, and maybe 50 percent of your salary comes from teaching and 50 percent of your salary comes from research; and what you do there is governed by how good a researcher you are. But when you are in the teaching side of the university we are going to do things very differently. We are first of all going to hire you on your teaching ability. I don't care if you are the world's best scholar on some topic. The question is: can you teach it? Very often the best teachers are not the best scholars. ER: Does that imply a failure? NORMAN: Not at all. It's a different talent, a different art, a different sensibility. I know there are professors out there who understand my works better than I understand them. I am constantly amazed when I give talks at universities about the really deep, detailed questions I get about things that I myself have written that I myself don't remember any more. ER: Any other changes you'd like to implement? NORMAN: I would not have tenure. I think tenure in theory is designed to preserve the academic freedom of the professor. It is rarely invoked for that purpose. In fact it has become a shield. First of all it becomes a horrible barrier. The young assistant professor has one of the worst jobs in the world. The assistant professor is a fairly senior person with a doctor's degree and yet he or she must fight increased academic loads, burdensome committee work, a large number of new courses, and, on top of all this, the fear of not being granted tenure. And although most professors are serious about working throughout their life, tenure still remains a shield behind which a few professors can retreat. And that demoralizes the system. I would not have today's tenure. I would substitute an n-year or security of employment. ER: And then? NORMAN: And then I would say we are here for education. And I would eliminate the normal lectures, the normal course sequences, but instead start over again, asking what is the best way to get our students to be the best educated and the best motivated in this field? And the motivation is in many ways more important than the education, because what you learn in a college is simply the first four years of your 30 or 40 or 50 years of productive work. What I really want students to understand is how to continue learning for the rest of their lives. And, finally, and consistent with this, this would be a school of lifelong learning. It wouldn't just be for the 17- to 21-year old. It would be for people of all ages to come back and to renew their education. SIDEBAR Higher
Education Fifteen Years From Now Will we still have traditional classrooms? Well, we've had them now for 2,000 years, so I don't see a reason why that's going to change in 15 more. But I could certainly imagine that much of the material is now going to be handed out, not on paper but electronically. No reason why a professor's notes can't be distributed to all students at the start of the lecture electronically. I can imagine that much of the teaching gets done in an asynchronous way. The notes may have been handed out before the lecture and some students will already have read them and already have questions on them. Let me try a different tack on this: The 50-minute lecture is a long-cherished tradition in academics, but it's not the best way to learn material. Its greatest virtue is that it is the easiest of all for the professor. If you are going to teach a class, the easiest thing on earth to do is give your three lectures a week and then essentially pass the burden on to the students and maybe the section leaders. But real learning comes from struggling with the problems, from an interaction with the problem in front of you, and then the knowledge. You learn when you have a need to learn. You don't learn very much from listening to a lecture. A lecture at best lets you know what the issues are and can perhaps serve as a motivating factor, lets you interact with somebody who cares about the subject. But students learn by working on problems, and the more relevant the problem to their own life, the more they are going to learn from them, the more that they can get involved themselves, focus on the problem, hit an impasse, hit a problem, hit a place where there's some difficulty and then fight their way through the difficulty. And we learn at those places of difficulty. So the real trick in education is to provide just the right level of difficulty to allow learning to occur and not to allow frustration to occur. If students are too frustrated, they will just give up. I would like to see a much more interactive style of learning where professors become coaches as opposed to the source of all knowledge. Now, the new technologies actually allow this to happen more than ever before. You can watch and monitor what the students are doing and come to them when they need help. You can also do simulations of everything from history to economics. So that students can suddenly get involved in real problems that would have been impossible to have been done before. This is the direction I would love to see things move. And I think the new technologies make this possible. I suspect that of all the institutions in the world it is academia that will change most slowly. So I'm not sure this would happen in 15 years. Professors are much too comfortable with their 50-minute lectures. And new schemes require huge amounts of effort to implement, even though they probably are superior for everyone. |
