Cold Day

I suppose it had to happen. With Kathy Sierra blogging on passionate users, hammering us in the head about how we must make users kick ass, she would eventually write an article that I, that I, that I....agree with.

Kathy recently wrote an article about how she was taking a class in digital photography, mainly to learn how to use her digital camera better. She's a smart woman. She started off in home economics, then discovered the programming bug, became a trainer of sorts, and helped start up the "Head First" series of books. She regularly speaks on the topic of creating passionate users.

Despite her sparkling resume, she's never been able to take full advantage of her digital camera, and thus, she signed up for a course. She wonders why she needs to do this? She can get a book on how to use her camera, but she notes, the book merely describes what the various knobs and buttons do.

They don't tell her why the knobs and buttons are there, and why she should care.

Hallelujah!

This is so freakingly common, especially in consumer electronics, to have devices that have hundreds of options. Frankly, I blame the Japanese with their fastidious need for controls and options and more options. This desire has permeated all of consumer electronic-dom so that even American technological products are stuffed to the gills with features.

It's not that the features are so bad, because once we discover them, we wonder how we ever did without. The problem is discovery. Give people too many choices, and they ignore them all. I have a new camera, and I can hardly tell you what all the features are. I almost never use the movie mode, except when a button has accidentally switched to that mode.

A good manual should tell you not only what the features are, but why they are there, and frankly, when you should use them, and how important they are. For example, white balancing. Digital camera sites will tell you "white balancing" is important. I barely know what that means. It has something to do with what humans perceive as white being mismatched with what the camera perceives as white. Humans can see white in shadows and white in bright sunlight, and think them the same. Cameras treat them differently.

I'd also love for manuals to tell me what's not there, though they aren't likely to do so. For example, tell me that I can't do aperture priority or fill flash. Think of their best camera and mention what this camera lacks relative to the big ones. There's one good reason for camera companies to do this. It gives customers incentives to pony up more money for top of the line cameras.

But the point is, I'd like to know that it's missing so I don't have to go look for it. I just don't want companies to go hog wild and purposely leave off features off their low end cameras to make me feel bad for buying them.

But Kathy's right in general. So many tutorials (books for dummies) just don't understand how to explain things to people. Here's a feature. Here's another feature. I won't tell you if feature A is killer, while feature B, you can live without. A good manual tries to convince people that they should learn this and how to go about doing this.

Alas, it's tough to find people who will write such books.

As Barry Schwartz, professor at Swarthmore, says, too much choice is debilitating. You always think you can do better. And even worse, as you get the thing you bought, you never fully utilize it the best you can. Companies need to seriously look at how to make these things better.

Every electronic product should come with a DVD or several, where nice friendly people step through the most important features and tell you when and where to use them. That's what people really want. To be told what to do, and to make the best use of what they want.

Well, Kathy, I admit it. This is a major gripe for me as well. Can't stand consumer electronics manuals. Painful to use!