When Life Changing Technology Fails

If I had to describe two bits of technology that have truly changed the way we live, the first would be the VCR/DVR and the second would be the GPS. One changed the way we look at time, the other the way we conceive of space.

Before the widespread adoption of time shifting tools the schedule of prime time television marked the passage of the week with much the same regularity as a medieval church bell sounding for evening vespers. The passage of the workweek/school week was marked by the progression from the Monday shows to the Thursday shows. (The passage of the years was marked by new shows becoming favorites, then reruns, then cancellations.) A curious side effect was the disorientation people felt as they visited across time zones and found their favorite show were on either an hour earlier or an hour later.

With the convenience of a DVR, time can be stopped, rewound or fast forwarded. If you would like to experience how pervasive this is, first get the technology, then get used to it, then check into a hotel that does not have it. The concentration that was no longer necessary now needs to be relearned. If anything at home seems interesting, and missed, just press the rewind button. 8 seconds back is one click. Two or more takes us backwards in increments of 8. One click forward skips 30 seconds. If anything is interesting enough to be watched live, the commercials are interminable.

Space was defined by driving through it, using local gas station or visitor center maps, or Rand McNally atlases (which showed multiple states and countries). Traveling any distance meant finding your starting and ending points, and then finding the best route between them, based on your particular criteria that day. Did you want to make time or take in the scenery? Arguments broke out based on different routes, and people gained status based on their knowledge of the best shortcuts. Before you started it was clear where you were, where you wanted to be, and how you would cover the distance between the two.

Then technology intervened.

My smart phone (an Android) has a GPS app that allows me to enter the starting point ("my destination" – wherever that might be, and I don't even need to know where I am to make it work), then enter my destination. A route will appear, small enough to only allow viewing the next few miles of a hundred mile journey. A voice will instruct me to turn in ¼ mile on the next leg of the journey. As this technology was tested, passed, and became part of my technology suite, a curious thing happened. I stopped conceiving of space as something I needed to know how to navigate through. Then an even more curious thing happened. The technology failed.

I had occasion to visit someone in an unknown location. No problem, I had the address and I had my GPS. A quarter mile away from the end point I lost the connection to the navigational satellite. That last ¼ mile took an hour to navigate as one initial wrong turn compounded itself. When leaving for the next leg of the journey, the GPS plotted a route that took us over 275 miles of streets, back roads, and small two-lane highways (and yes, there was a large road alternative, and no, I had not selected "avoid highways.")

We bought an atlas, then used it to take major roads. We turned on the GPS only after we had put sufficient distance between us and the last tiny-road turn-off. It was both amusing and sad. And it did illustrate just how fragile some of the technology we take for granted can be.

Going Up? : Of Interfaces and Elevators

I will be teaching a class on information visualization this summer at Harrisburg University. Last evening I attended a faculty get together at the school. Something I had noted each time I have been there combined with a project I have been thinking about all day and the result is this post. It has nothing to do with information visualization, Harrisburg University itself, teaching strategies, or anything of that nature (well at least not yet). It has to do with elevators.

I am sure that everyone has a clear and unambiguous idea of how to ride an elevator, but allow me to state that explicitly here. You walk into an office building. If necessary, you exchange pleasantries with the security folks. You are directed to the elevator bank, where you push a button on the wall to get an elevator. If necessary, you wait, and then when the doors open you get on. You select a floor, then get off as appropriate.

Except here there are no buttons on the wall. There are two banks of elevators on opposite walls. There is a podium like device in the middle of the floor, between both elevator banks, and it is used not only to summon an elevator, but to specify the floor that you want. The device then tells you which elevator you will be taking. When you get on the elevator there are no buttons to select a floor, you just go where you said you wanted to go.

So, the first thing that needs to be said is that this system works flawlessly, at least on every occasion that I have been there. I got on, elevated (or descended), and then got off. So why am I writing about it?

Because it feels odd. (is is appropriate to discuss an elevator interface as potentially "intuitive"?- is this something we can grasp?) If I were feeling philosophical I might describe it as an especially deterministic mode of travel. One cannot get on the elevator and decide, spontaneously, that some task on a different floor had been momentarily forgotten, with a quick button push all that was needed to correct the oversight. You WILL go where you said you wanted to go. Then there is the actual ride, which if taken in solitude gives one the opportunity to note the lack of any floor-select buttons, which I find somehow constricting. What if I needed to get off before I get where I'm going? Yes, I probably never would, but the lack of that ability discords.

An aside: I had a very chic phone in the kitchen. It was brushed stainless steel (actually brushed stainless plastic) in the shape of an old style wall phone. The touch tone buttons were shaped like an old rotary dial. It looked very stylish, but I couldn't use it to call people very easily. All my numbers had been stored internally in geometric patterns – the round shape made me stop and think explicitly about what number I was calling. It slowed me down and it was very annoying. Again, the thing worked perfectly, it was just odd.

So, what does this have to do with training?

I have been reviewing a large number of web based modules for a class I am working on. I have seen a large number of interfaces of late. Some are better, some are worse. The interesting ones are those that are consciously attempting to be better, but like the elevators at Harrisburg University, have not prepared me for their improvement, and which conflict with my user expectations. They lead me to ponder the differences between progress and status quo, expectation and innovation. And how to quantify intuition.