After yesterday’s discussion of whether enterprise applications are doomed to be dull and “unsexy,” I thought it would be a good opportunity to provide a review of Donald Norman’s new book, The Design of Future Things. Norman doesn’t talk about ERP or enterprise applications, nor does he focus on software “products” per se — though he does have some things to say about Apple’s ill-fated Newton, and some of the work going on at IBM’s Almaden research center. Indeed, many of his examples are focused on future generations of “smart” automobiles and “smart” houses, along with various other kinds of quasi-intelligent devices.

Since most of us are not in the business of designing automobiles, you might ask why we should bother reading a book filled with advice about such things. Well, aside from the fact that it might make us more intelligent consumers of such products — i.e., better able to make an intelligent choice between product A and product B when we next venture into an auto showroom — many of us are trying to develop software products (or hardware/software products, or “systems,” or whatever you want to call them) that interact with our end-users more successfully than we’ve done in the past. Whether we tend to characterize the interaction between machine and human as “slick,” or “sexy,” or simply “user-friendly,” Norman has long been a source of common sense and good advice — going back at least as far as his 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things.

Indeed, a great deal of this new book is a critical reminder of just how limited and frustrating many of today’s so-called user-friendly, intelligent systems really are. As he says in the opening chapter of his book,

“So-called intelligent systems have become too smug. They think they know what is best for us. Their intelligence, however, is limited. And this limitation is fundamental: there is no way a machine has sufficient knowledge of all the factors that go into human decision making. But this doesn’t mean we should reject the assistance of intelligent machines. As machines start to take over more and more, however, they need to be socialized; they need to improve the way they communicate and interact and to recognize their limitations. Only then can they become truly useful. This is a major theme of this book.”

While he is critical, and perhaps even pessimistic, about the current state of technology and intelligent systems, he is apparently optimistic about the future. Focusing on his primary example of automobiles, for example, he predicts that:

“Someday cars will no longer need drivers. Instead, people will all be passengers, able to gossip, read, or even sleep while the car chauffeurs them to their destination … When this day arrives, and I expect it to happen some time in the twenty-first century, the entity known as car+driver will be extinct. Instead, we will have cars, and we will have people, just as we used to, except now the car will be visceral, behavioral, and fective: a truly intelligent, autonomous machine, as least for the purposes of transportation, which will include not only the navigation and driving but also taking care of the comfort and well-being of the passengers, providing the right lighting, temperature, food and drink, and entertainment.”

Indeed, even before this quasi-utopia arrives, Norman foresees the day when:

“Your car will soon chat with neighboring cars, exchanging all sorts of interesting information. Cars will communicate with one another through wireless networks, technically called ‘ad hoc’ networks because they will form as needed, letting them warn one another about what’s down the road … future automobiles will tell oncoming autos about traffic and highway conditions, obstacles, collisions, bad weather, and all sorts of other things …

In addition to this kind of high-level, abstract gazing into the future, Norman has a lot of detailed advice and observations. One that I found particularly interesting was the notion of how systems should be designed to help end-users figure out figure out who is to blame for (and what should be done about) an unexpected and erroneous result from the system. His example is Apple’s hand-held Newton, whose initial handwriting-recognition software was lampooned in a 1993 Doonesbury cartoon, in which the cartoon character wrote “Catching on?” and which the Newton interpreted as “Egg freckles?” Several years later, Apple developed a superior handwriting-recognition system called Rosetta, in which errors were typically limited to a single character; thus, the end-user might write “hand” with his stylus, and the software might erroneously interpret it as “nand.” As Norman says:

“Notice how the conceptual model completely reverses the notion of where blame is to be placed. Conventional wisdom among human-centered designers is that if a device fails to deliver the expected results, it is the device or its design that should be blamed. When the machine fails to recognize handwriting, especially when the reason for the failure is obscure, people blame the machine and become frustrated and angry. WIth Rosetta, however, the situation completely reversed: people are quite happy to place the blame on themselves if it appears that they did something wrong, especially when what they are required to do appears reasonable. Rather than becoming frustrated, they simply resolve to be more careful next time.”

The final portion of the book discusses and explains six “rules” that Norman feels are essential for establishing an effective interaction between humans and the emerging generation of intelligent systems — whether those systems are automobiles, homes, cell phones, or enterprise applications. Here they are:

• Design Rule One: Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.
• Design Rule Two: Be predictable.
• Design Rule Three: Provide a good conceptual model.
• Design Rule Four: Make the output understandable.
• Design Rule Five: Provide continual awareness, without annoyance.
• Design Rule Six: Exploit natural mappings to make interactions understandable and effective.

Obviously, some designers, some project teams, and some companies are better at this than others. And it’s interesting to see the difference when you compare two products — whether it’s Apple’s Newton versus the initial Palm Pilot (with its Graffiti software), or the GPS navigation system of auto-manufacturer A versus B — and put them side by side. Norman doesn’t discuss the question of whether a truly elegant design would be sufficient to compensate for an unreliable, unstable, insecure, non-scalable system; it’s only a guess, but I suspect he would argue that all of those “engineering” attributes are a prerequisite before we can even begin to talk about his world of design.

Nor does Norman talk about one of the philosophical themes of the debate that bounced back and forth across the blogosphere yesterday, when several of us were discussing the merits of sexy, well-designed enterprise applications. If you have the power to impose a system upon its end-users, as most large corporations do with their (employee) end-users, then you can get away with mediocre crap with the lame excuse that the only thing that matters is stability, security, and scalability. Large corporations have been getting away with that sort of thing since the Industrial Age began; and some of them will manage to continue getting away with it for another hundred years, if not longer.

But even if that’s true, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to work in such a company; and it’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to spend their days interacting with computer systems that violate most, if not all, of Norman’s design rules. So it’s worth reading The Design of Future Things just to remind ourselves of the features and principles that we should be looking for — in the cars we drive, in the homes we live in, in the systems we use, and in the companies we work for.