Systems Design vs. Information Design
- Details
- Created on 03 September 2008
- Written by Steve Burrows
I am currently testing the Asus EeePC 1000H Ultra Mobile PC (which is excellent, a super bit of kit for the money). It has a 1024 x 600 screen, so an aspect ratio of approx 16:9. This is rather "letterbox" in comparison with a more conventional 4:3 screen, and so exacerbates one of the fundamental design issues in Information Systems.
Computer system display screens are on the whole landscape or horizontal in presentation. Documents, the primary tool of the Information Worker, are generally portrait or vertical in their construction. It repeatedly frustrates me that the majority of hardware and software designers fail to recognise this.
A couple of years ago I was about to replace a substantial proportion of the laptop PC fleet operated by my company. A loyal Dell customer, I intended to replace our Latitude D600 and D610 laptops with the new Latitude D620. I ordered a small batch to start with, and took one myself for evaluation. Opening the package I found that Dell's new standard business laptop was endowed with a 16:9 widescreen display. Within an hour it became apparent that I was having to scroll up and down much more. Even the briefest of emails extended off the bottom of the screen. Writing documents was a major pain, requiring me to scroll up to review sentences I had written only a few minutes before because they had disappeared from the screen.
I contacted my corporate account manager at Dell, who informed me that the 16:9 widescreen format was the new standard, flat panel manufacturers were ceasing production of 4:3 format displays, and all of Dell's future laptops would feature 16:9 format screens. I explained that 16:9 was great for playing DVDs, but I bought laptops for my staff to work on, and working meant processing long documents. Unless Dell changed its policy I would be buying my laptops elsewhere. To cut a long story short, I wrote to Dell explaining why 16:9 was less suitable that 4:3 for professional users, was singularly inappropriate for the needs of road warriors, and why I would soon be shopping with HP or IBM (Lenovo).
Dell responded with the Latitude D520, reintroducing the 4:3 format screen into their laptop range. I bought a bundle of them.
Which brings me in roundabout fashion to the point. This super little Asus laptop shares the same letterbox screen format as the Dell D620 and inummerable small widescreen TVs and DVD players. Which is fine, it is an extertainment machine not intended for professional use. But as I sit writing this mini opus I am again frustrated by the software design of most GUI applications that adopt a window layout in which the status bars and menu are slashed horizontally across the screen, exacerbating the letterbox effect. If application designers thought momentarily about the purpose of the business software they produce they would put the control mechanisms down the side instead of across the top. I'm sure if challenged they would say "but it's always been done this way". I am old enough to remember why; the Xerox Alto, the Three Rivers PERQ, and many other of the early machines which introduced the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) display environment we use today had portrait format screens, typically 3:4 in aspect ratio, because the systems designers of 25 years ago understood that they were creating systems for displaying Information, primarily in the form of Documents. With that layout it was appropriate to consume some horizontal real estate for menus etc., leaving a really useful large squarish area for the display of information. It is a pity that those who copied that early innovation to give us the computer systems that we use now did so blindly, without understanding the "Information Systems" requirements that led to the designs in the first place, and lumbered us with the rather stupid and unfriendly application layout that most Windows users suffer today, epitomising that, despite billion-dollar R&D budgets, systems designers are still failing to understand that Information Systems are tools for working with Information.
