Daylight Savings Time is arriving in a couple of hours — and like millions of people throughout the U.S. (and any other part of the world affected by our bizarre behavior regarding time), that means changing dozens of different clocks all through the household. Aside from being an annoyance, this semi-annual experience has alerted me to an issue that user-interface designers, and software developers in general, need to consider more carefully: the occasional user of their systems

When I was a young man, I had a wrist-watch and an alarm clock by my bedside; changing the time was a manual affair, and it took less than a minute to change them both in the spring and the fall. But now, of course, I’ve got time-keeping mechanisms in my iPod, my iPhone, my Blackberry, my Palm Pilot, both of my laptop computers, both desktop computers, three different digital cameras, a dishwasher (why?), an electric oven, the coffee-maker, the digital landline phone,two differrent DVR recording devices … plus the $10 Timex wristwatch that I wear, and three or four different digital alarm clocks scattered throughout the house. Some of these devices are connected to a network, and are smart enough to check with a time-keeping system somewhere on the Internet in order to ensure that they have the correct time. Others (like two of my three digital cameras, but not the third) are smart enough to know that Daylight Savings Time arrives in the spring, and disappears in the fall; so if the time was set properly to begin with, they should update themselves automatically.

The rest of the time-keeping appliances and devices require manual intervention, but it’s a relatively brainless process to advance the clock by an hour, and then set it back an hour in the fall… except for one very stubborn device: my automobile. Because of the incomprehensible user interface on the control panel of my car, I’ve often given up on changing the time, and simply accepted the fact that the clock would be off by an hour for six months of the year.

I should point out that my current car is a Japanese model, and I’ve leased it for a couple years; before that, it was a German car, which I had for about three years. I won’t identify the specific make or model, because I’m not trying to insult any specific manufacturer; but the fact that both cars have been so user-hostile for a relatively simple function made me stop and think about what’s going on …

While the basic functions of driving a car still involve the mechanical activities of pushing on the gas pedal and the brake pedal, while turning the steering wheel one way or the other, an increasing number of important functions require interacting with one or more computer systems — through a user interface that consists of the driver’s dashboard, a collection of buttons, knobs, and switches, plus a rectangular “control panel” located between the diver and the passenger. Some of the functions are trivial — e.g., deciding whether to display the outside temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit, or deciding whether to display the odometer results for the current trip, or for the lifetime of the car. Some of them are more important, such as adjusting the front and rear windshield wipers and defrosting mechanisms, or programming the GPS navigation system.

But many, if not most, of these functions are things we use every day — so, after whatever initial confusion we may have faced with a non-intuitive user interface, and a 400-page driver’s manual translated from Japanese/German into English by deranged mutants, we eventually figure it out, and then proceed to use these functions instinctively.

But how often do you change the time-of-day clock in your car, once it’s been set (assuming that it wasn’t set by the auto dealer when you first got the car)? Answer: twice a year, once in the spring, and once in the fall. With my previous (German) car, I simply could not find any description in the user manual; it may have been there somewhere, but it was a mystery to me. And my my attempts to push the right buttons on the control panel, using intuition and common sense, led me in the same circles, over and over again. It took — and this is not an exaggeration — a full 30 minutes to figure it out, and I still don’t know how I did it.

More importantly, I couldn’t remember how I did it six months later, when it was time to undo the Daylight Savings time adjustment that I had made a season earlier. And I didn’t have half an hour to spare, sitting in the garage while cursing at the user interface; nor did I have sufficient time when I next drove the car, nor the time after that. And after a while, I simply stopped looking at the clock; as far as I was concerned, it was irretrievably broken.

My current (Japanese) car is a little better: it took only 15 minutes to figure out how to change the clock last fall, when Daylight Savings time ended. But I have no idea how I finally succeeded, and I don’t anticipate having the spare time, or the patience, to spend another 15 minutes fiddling with the clock the next several times I use the car.

Actually, my situation is far worse: because I live in New York City, I often leave my car sitting in the garage for weeks at a time before using it to drive off into the suburbs; there’s no point using the car for traveling around Manhattan, with taxis and public transportation alternatives. So, whenever I get into the car, there are an enormous number of minor functions that I really do need to use, but which I last used a month, or two months earlier. When I drove the car a few days ago,r example, I simply could not find the little buttons that one uses to adjust the side mirrors; it turned out that they were located in a recessed panel that could be covered up with a sliding door. One of my kids had driven the car a few days earlier, and apparently decided to hide the side-mirror control buttons from view; my wife eventually found the details in the user manual, but that was only after we had driven 20 miles with only the rear-view mirror to depend on.

It seems to me that we’re going to face more and more situations like this in our increasingly computer-controlled lives. There are some devices, systems, and functions that we use on a daily, or even hourly basis; we understand them (whether or not we ever bothered to read the user manual), and we know how to change them to accommodate our changing needs.

But there are other devices, systems, and functions that we’ve set in a particular way, and even though we continue to use them on a daily basis, we no longer remember how to change them. My automatic coffee-maker, for example, goes off at 7 AM every morning; aside from the seasonal problem of adjusting for Daylight Savings time, there is the more fundamental problem that I don’t know how to change the clock if I decide, for example, that I need to get up an hour earlier tomorrow, and thus need my coffee at 6 AM.

And there are devices, systems, and functions that I use every day, but which someone else set up initially, and I’ve never learned how to use. God forbid I should ever have to change the intricate system that my wife has set up to record TV shows at various times of the day and night; I understand the principles involved, but she’s got three different remote-control units that control the behavior of three different televisions and two different recording devices. I’m not about to touch them, especially because she has threatened severe bodily injury if I mess up the settings so that her favorite shows don’t get recorded.

There are also devices, systems, and functions that we once understood intimately, long ago, but then put aside for some reason … but now have to use once again. My Blackberry is a good example: I rarely use it now that I have an iPhone –but if I travel internationally, the iPhone’s email and Internet services are outrageously expensive, so I need to switch back to the Blackberry - plus remember how to operate the Blackberry in a foreign environment, when I’m trying to figure out how to connect to a network in Rome, and make phone calls back to New York.

I don’t know how we’re going to solve this problem — and I suspect that the designer/developers of our modern systems have little or not interest in doing so. It’s understandable that they’ll focus most of their attention on the high-priority, commonly used features and functions; and for the obscure, seldom-used features and functions, they’ll point their frustrated customers at a 500-page user manual, or a hard-to-access FAQ system on their web site.

In the long run, then, chances are that I’ll have to take responsibility for my own needs with regard to these obscure functions — after all, both the Germans and the Japanese seem content to let me thrash around in frustration with the Daylight Savings problem, and I very much doubt that American auto manufacturers are going to be much better. And since Daylight Savings is a predictable, regular occurrence, it just means that I’ll have to devote the forethought, and the time and energy to write down the details of how to solve the problem after that first half-hour exercise in frustration, and then make sure my notes are easily accessible when the same problem occurs six months from now.

I can’t help wondering whether I’ll have the forethought, the patience, and the discipline to do all of this. Chances are that I’ll just continue to curse at my car every time the time-patterns change in the spring and the fall. And I’ll utter similar curses at my coffee-maker, my DVR-recorder, and the Blackberry device that I’ve just dusted off for an upcoming trip to India.

But somehow, it seems to me that all of this automation stuff was supposed to make our lives uniformly and predictably easier and better. And somehow, it’s not working out that way…