SBA

IT’s All About “U”

Long ago, when I worked in ITT’s Engineering Research Centre developing the UK’s early digital telephone exchanges, there was a small department that specialised in Human Factors Engineering, sometimes called Ergonomics. One of the engineers therein explained to me the fundamentals of their work - evaluating product designs for both mechanical operability by humans (buttons, labelling, easy to hold etc.), and psychological operability - the terminology, layout, clarity and logical grouping of information on display screens, sequencing of operator menus etc. Basically all of the aspects of the Man-Machine Interface (“MMI”) which make operation of a machine seem more intuitive and simple to a human. Human Factors Engineering is generally a broader discipline than the User Interface (“UI”) considerations in software development, because it also encompasses the design of the hardware which a person will use to control the system.

This all came flooding back recently, when Hertz at Manchester Airport “kindly” upgraded my car hire from an everyday mid-size hatch, and instead gave me a shiny new Audi Q3 S-tronic compact 4x4, which seems to be equipped with loads of toys. I have driven many gadget-laden and high-performance cars over the years, so I’m used to driving automatics, semi-automatics, cars with flappy paddles, cars with cruise-control, sat-nav etc. and the vast array of displays, knobs and switches used to operate them, including Audi’s, but I’ve not driven one of this model before. 

I set the built-in Sat Nav for my destination, and set off. Approaching the first junction cautiously, gentle foot on the brake pedal to slow for the white line, and thump - I was thrown forward as the car stopped dead. No pedal travel before the brakes engaged, instant emergency stop. I’ve driven top-end Jaguar, Maserati, Tesla, Mercedes, Lancia, Alfa-Romeo, Audi and Subaru sports cars - none have ever had such fierce on-off brakes as this particular Q3. Lesson learned. The Sat-Nav directed me West towards the M6 South and I soon picked up the road signs I needed and followed those. 

Glancing at the “Driver Information System” (DIS) between the speedometer and rev counter I noticed it said “offroad” which I, as a long-term Range-Rover owner, immediately interpreted to mean that the car (a 4x4) was in off-road mode - either the suspension was raised or the low ratio gearbox engaged - not the best set-up for motorway driving. I cast my eyes frantically over the various knobs and switches to no avail, until they came to rest on the Sat-Nav map display, which showed that the car was several hundred metres from the known route, and not on a marked road. The new, improved, A556 on which I was driving opened in March this year - but the Sat-Nav didn’t have that data so it told me the car was “offroad”. Not a problem, I carried on to the M6 and turned South.

Leaving the M6 at Junction 8 I turned on to the M5 and carried on South in heavy traffic. Glancing at the dashboard it again confused me because the aforementioned Driver Information System said M6. After a quick panic I again glanced at the Sat-Nav display which showed I was on the M5. At some point, probably in signalling left to leave the M6, I had nudged a (black and almost hidden) flappy paddle and thus changed the Automatic gearbox from Auto to Manual and nudged it down from 7th gear into 6th gear. I wiggled the “ordinary” automatic selector and M6 changed to D7.

One way or another, the Audi Q3 and I did not gel, it was not appropriate for my needs of a hire car - get in and drive. I like high performance cars, and the ferocious Audi S6 in the company fleet was a favourite Q-car, but the Q3? The Man Machine Interface was clearly designed for folks with time to read the user manual, the User Interface was overly complicated, and consequently my User Experience (“UX”) was unsatisfactory. I would have preferred that Hertz had given me a simple basic hatchback with a manual gearstick.

So it is with computers, smartphones etc. Apple MacOS, Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android, Blackberry all have their fans because those devices provide the User Interface that the user finds most intuitive and productive. Success in migrating people from one design paradigm to another depends on them finding the User Experience sufficiently intuitive, satisfying and productive that they can abandon the “old way”. It’s really no different to changing business process and other activities where the human component has an expectation - through training, prior experience or intuition - of how it should work.

Last week saw a raft of announcements from Google - new products including the Google Pixel 2 Android smartphone (5-inch screen) and the Pixel 2XL (6-inch), the Google Pixelbook convertible ChromeOS laptop, the new Pixel Buds wireless headphones, and the Google Home Mini and Home Max loudspeakers. The Pixel 2 smartphones take a direct shot at Apple’s iPhone - as well made and stylish, but maybe faster and cheaper, and running Android. The Pixelbook goes after the top-end of the ultralight convertible laptop / tablet space occupied by Apple’s Macbook Air laptop, iPad, Microsoft Surface Book laptop and Microsoft Surface Pro tablet. The Home Mini and Max devices go head to head with the Amazon Echo range of listening speakers. 

All of these new Google devices have been lauded by the reviewers / critics, both for their tangible quality as premium hardware devices and for their functionality and ease of use. It’s an ambitious play, Google the Advertising / Search / Software company has clearly decided to enter the premium user hardware market and target each of Apple, Microsoft and Amazon - presumably to migrate more premium users to the Google eco-system - and they appear to have made a good start but how will they overcome the resistance of folks in moving from their comfortable relationships with their existing brand’s Man Machine Interface design philosophies to the Google way of working?

Google Assistant. Announced to developers in spring 2016, and launched in the new Google Home speaker and Pixel smartphone this time last year, Google Assistant uses Google’s latest Artificial Intelligence systems to provide multilingual natural language speech interaction, without prior training, across all of the new Google Pixel and Home hardware products as well as providing an app to retrofit it to many recent Android and Apple smartphones. Reviewers who have compared Google Assistant with the competition from Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa seem to find that Google Assistant is superior - its speech recognition is more accurate, its natural language processing understands your requests and commands better, and the results / responses it gives you are more appropriate. 

As our computerised systems become ever-more capable and complicated to operate, Google seems to heading towards the biggest simplification currently possible to the Man Machine Interface - a single method of commanding our technology, in the home, at work and on the move, across all types of device from all major manufacturers. It seems that Google is intending to leverage its significant superiority in Artificial Intelligence developments to demote and devalue its competitors into mere third-party providers of access terminals to the Google Experience.

As long-term user of mobile email I was keen to try the new Android smartphone when it came out in 2008. I got one of the first units in the UK and I found it to be intuitive out of the box. I had my email running on it in moments without reading any user instructions, and promptly abandoned the Blackberry which I had been using for the previous few years, the new Google Android system “simply worked”. Currently over 80% of new smartphones sold run Android - the Google sweet factory has already completely crushed RIM’s Blackberry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile smartphone efforts into insignificance, and Apple’s iPhone looks to be headed the same way. 

Whilst Google’s new hardware products look nice and seem to be premium toys, none of them seem especially distinctive or innovative except for the universal inclusion of Google Assistant. This seems to be the differentiator - Google have moved on from the Smartphone as productivity tool, to the “Virtual Personal Assistant Everywhere” as a productivity tool, using its superiority in in Artificial Intelligence to give you a more intuitive User Interface and a better User Experience across all devices.

I’m looking forward to seeing all the extra knobs, buttons, flappy paddles etc. disappearing from premium cars - the day when I can climb into a hire car at Manchester, say “OK Google, drive in economy mode, give me directions to Telford, warn me about the speed traps and play me some acoustic guitar blues” is going to be here soon.