TouchScreen Esperanto?
In my time supporting automation systems I often have had the compliant come back that the interfaces are too daunting, confusing. Such complaints are so common that ICIA published a paper “Dashboard for Control’ to act as a template for interface design. The documents are more ‘like guidelines then actual rules..” as Barbossa would say. My current interface uses the System Builder template which as Dashboard concepts built right in.
Still I get people who are either taken back by a touch screen just at the concept or cannot make sense of ‘all the buttons’. To prove that it can be intuitive, I showed my 3 yr old twice how to turn the system on and find ‘his’ page. All the icons are graphical. As you can see my 3 yr old can easily navigate the touchpanel. He is so comfortable with the interface that he has begun to teach my 1 year old.
That is fine enough, you may say, but it is like the old joke: the package said ‘so easy a 5 year old can assemble it’, so would someone get me a 5 year old to put this together?! Granted children absorb new concepts, just look at how all the kids who watch ‘ni hao kai lan’ can recite the colors in Chinese. But, it does not have to be that difficult. Simple straight forward concepts make the transition from one form factor to another more about getting a task done than the bells and whistles.
About 6 months ago my wife’s mother watched the kids for us, when asked by my son if he could watch TV grandma took one look and said she did not know how. “oh, I so you” was his response and he promptly turned on the AV system and choose Disney. Once he taught the grandma, the device was not so fearful. Now, partly based on her comfort level with our home system grandma has downloaded her first songs from the itunes store and connected her Nano to her car’s in board connector. ‘It’s so cool and easy’ she recently told me. Custom design is a wonderful thing but if it is complicated no one but the person who created will use it. I would love to spend hour’s custom designing a touch screen theme but if I uploaded it to the panel I would have my wife calling me all day asking where to find this or that function. KISS rule applies to all our designs.
(note: the yell is my 1 year old waiting impatiently for the TV and spilling some books on the floor)
