The inevitable frustrations of information appliances

Careful design that is focused on human factors, and incorporates powerful processors and software,
can provide information appliances that are a delight to use. The Palm Pilot and game consoles
prove this. However, that does not mean that we will be delighted with the new electronic environment
full of such gadgets, even if (and this is a big if) each is excellent by itself. Information appliances are
not supposed to be standalone devices. In Don Norman’s definition (p. 53 of [Norman]), “[a] distinguished
feature of information appliances is the ability to share information among themselves.” Information
appliances are meant to be “cooperating devices,” a felicitous term coined by Bob Frankston.
We will want our car to tell our house control system to warm up the family room in time for our arrival,
and “the refrigerator [to] know it was low on milk and eggs and place an order with the local supermarket”
[Lewis]. Once all the radios, refrigerators, dishwashers, clocks, coffee pots, and other devices in
our houses are replaced by new models that are information appliances, the current 40 isolated microprocessors
per household may grow to perhaps 400 communicating devices. Will they all interoperate
smoothly? They certainly do not do so now. Consider just the difficulty of setting up home networks,
even for simple connections of PCs [Lewis]. Similar problems arise in setting up cable modem and
ADSL connections. Once the number of devices to be connected increases, and wireless communication
expands, the difficulties will increase. No single problem will be insurmountable. However, the
range of problems to be solved will be growing rapidly with increasing complexity of the system.
Don Norman recognizes the difficulty this poses (see Chapter 3 of [Norman]) but forecasts that
a solution can be achieved through “world-wide agreement on the appropriate infrastructure that will
allow appliances to share their information with appropriate other appliances.” Bill Gates promises to
fulfill that vision, so that “when you buy a new device, you’ll know it will function with your existing
equipment” [Gates]. Yet will Microsoft deliver, given that it now creates software that does not allow
for easy transfer of information from one Microsoft software package on a PC to another copy of the
same package on a different PC [Alsop]?
It helps to compare information appliances to programs on a PC. Each application might be delightful
to use, but it is the interaction of these applications with each other, and with the operating system,
that creates most of the complexity and frustration (cf. [Alsop]). The PC is used widely in spite of its
shortcomings because most people rely on just a few applications, and in an application, they usually
depend on only a small subset of its features. They thus learn to live with the complexities of the PC by
avoiding them. However, those complexities are there. Einstein said that “everything should be made

as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Unfortunately we are asking our computers, whether standard
PCs or the information appliances of the future, to do complex things. Even if a spreadsheet and a
word processor work fine, asking for the ability to bring in a graph from the spreadsheet into the word
processor creates a new level of complexity, with more opportunities for bugs.
In the information appliance environment, complexities similar to those of the PCs will also be
present, and in many ways will be magnified. After all, on a PC everything is in a single box, and the
standard procedure for dealing with problems is to reboot the PC. Will we have to go around the house
rebooting the potentially hundreds of information appliances that we might own? Even if we could do
it, it might not solve the problem if the difficulty is in interaction with our neighbor’s system, or that of
our in-laws on the other side of the continent. A small taste of the problems that are likely to plague us
is given in [Levy]:
... Bill Joy [of Sun Microsystems, a vocal critic of the PC and an advocate of information
appliances] offers to print out a paper that illustrates a salient point. He reaches for his
laptop, which is equipped with the sort of wireless high-speed Internet connection that, one
day, may be a routine adornment in all our cameras, palmtops, game machines, medical
sensors and, yes, dishwashers. According to the theory, these will all be linked together, ot
course, in an infrastructure that will virtually eliminate crashes and glitches. He keyboards
the command to print the document in the adjoining room. And nothing happens. “You
know what?” he finally says. “I think this did get printed–on the printer back in my house
across town.”
The proponents of information appliances promise that technologies such as Bluetooth and Jini will
solve the problem. Yet one should be skeptical of whether these promises will be realized. The problem
is not necessarily that the technologies are inadequate to achieve the promised goals. Rather, it seems
likely that, just as in the past, the computing and communications industry will not concentrate on
those goals. Consider again the PC. Graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, and Java
are just three of the technologies that were supposed to revolutionize computing and make life simpler.
Remarkably, these three did succeed and our computing would be much more primitive without them.
Still, their main effect has been to create more complicated systems, not to simplify old ones.
Building complicated systems that work is hard. Building ones that work and are user-friendly is
much harder. Further, it is necessary to balance the demand for user-friendliness with the demand for

more features. Although most users complain that they want simpler versions of applications such as
Microsoft Office, their “responses support Microsoft’s contention that while few people use more than
a tiny percentage of the programs’ features, everyone wants a different 10%” [Wildstrom]. The history
of the past two decades shows that when the choice was between new features and ease of use, new
features have won. The victory of the PC over the Mac is just one example of this. As Edward Tenner
[Tenner] pointed out,
Microsoft has triumphed because it has given us what we asked for: constant novelty coupled
with acceptable stability, rather than the other way around. ... People talk simplicity
but buy features and pay the consequences. Complex features multiply hidden costs and
erode both efficiency and simplicity.
In the evolution towards the information appliance era, we can expect similar outcomes, not because
they are preordained by technology or dictated by Microsoft, but because that is what people are willing
to pay for. The premium will continue to be on being first to market with the latest innovation, not on
ease of use.