Parking Meters and User Interfaces

I was listening to NPR, which is something I do rather frequently when I'm on the road. There was a discussion about the modernization of parking meters. Ever look for a parking spot and found there was still some change in the meter? You're happy that you don't have to spend nearly as much money by using that spot. New parking meters will detect cars using sonar (or some similar device). If they notice your car is gone, it will reset the meter to zero, thus forcing the next person to have to pay the full amount. On the other hand, these meters are designed to give you a free five minutes if you need to do something quickly, and come back out.

A representative says that parking meters, which were invented in the 1930s or so (1932, as it turns out) haven't changed much since they first came out. They've had almost no innovation in nearly 90 years.

But software. People always want to innovate, don't they? Look at YouTube. How many times have they tinkered with their interface in the last six months? Like twice? Did the functionality actually change? Not really. YouTube may have innovated the button in the center of the image to start playing, which was round when it first came out. It's square now.

And the controls? There's a splash of red in that now.

I remember when ESPN would change its website design like every six months as well. Fortunately, major news websites only feel a redesign every few years or so. Washington Post and NY Times both redesigned, but I suspect the design will stay around for a year, before they get tired of the way it looks.

No one's done much to move the design away from a smaller sized newspaper. ESPN's site is pretty busy, as are many sites. The thought is the more clicks you make, the less effective the website is (the tradeoff between clean design and clutter).

User interfaces have become video games. Each year, a new version comes out, and you're expected to master the new controls, and figure out new actions, all without any instruction. One day, I think, it will be nearly mandatory to have video lessons associated with user interfaces, and software will be judged by how good these lessons are, rather than how good the software actually is.

Microsoft, in its redesign of Office, has noticed that many features are unused, and so they've put their best user interface folks to rethink how Office should be laid out so more of these features are more obvious.

This is the kind of research software companies really need to do. Open source folks probably suffer the most when it comes to making these design decisions that help out users. Developers add more and more features, but lack the resource to do usability testing, especially on expert tools such as IDEs. They add features which they think will be useful to the power user, but then fail to explain this to the power user, requiring their deep investigation to learn how to use it.

Most user interfaces, at least product-specific interfaces, won't even last a year or two before it's redesigned. We can barely imagine interfaces that last 80 years, like the parking meter. While some ideas may last quite a while--menus, buttons, sliders--the entire user experience is likely to change like the latest version of Madden (though some would quibble about how much innovation Madden really goes under).

This suggests that user interfaces are still in its infancy, but I think we're just dealing with the reality--and fluidity--of user interfaces. There's no going back to a simple interface that's easy to learn because there's no functionality. Everything's packed to the gills with more features than you'll ever have time to learn.

And that's supposed to be a good thing.