VideoThe two biggest consumer-technology successes of recent times are a white page and a wheel. The white page belongs to Google, the world's most popular search engine; the wheel to Apple's iPod, the world's most popular portable music player with a hard disk. Both form part of so-called "interfaces" — metaphorical gateways through which humans enter and navigate around a technology. Both are also picture-book examples of simplicity concealing complexity underneath.
The white page is said to have come about as follows. In its early days, Google kept receiving strange anonymous e-mails containing only the number 53. Sometimes they stopped coming, then they started again. Eventually, one of Google's geniuses figured out that the e-mails arrived whenever Google had made changes to its web home page that expanded its word count beyond 53. The anonymous adviser was telling Google to keep down the clutter (although why he picked 53 as the cut-off point remains a mystery). In August this year, Google made the biggest stockmarket debut of any technology firm in history. The current word count on google.com is 27.
As for the iPod, "It is successful because it's simple," says Paul Mercer, the brainfather of its interface and the founder of Iventor, a technology-design firm. "It does few things, but some subtle things, and it is fluid." The simplicity comes from the wheel itself; the subtlety comes from features such as the acceleration built into the wheel, so that it seems to sense whether the user wants to scroll through songs slowly or fast. The genius lies in what is absent — there is no "fast-scroll" button. Instead, says Mr. Mercer, the "technology materializes only when needed", and thus "seems to intuit" the user's intention.
Google and the iPod are successful because each rescues consumers from a particular black hole of complexity. Google does it by putting a white page on top of the googol (the number 1, followed by 100 zeros) of potential web pages. The iPod does it by letting music lovers, in effect, carry all of their CDs with them in their pocket. Both solutions require an enormous technological apparatus behind the scenes. Google is said to operate some 100,000 servers. And Apple had to configure the iPod so that it automatically and fluently talks to iTunes, the music application that runs on users' PCs. Transferring songs from the PC to the iPod now requires nothing more than plugging in a single cable. (Both companies, incidentally, are notoriously secretive and refused to be interviewed for this survey.)
More Flops Than Hits
Perhaps the most startling thing about Google and the iPod, however, is
the fact that they stand out so much. There are very few other recent
examples of interfaces that have opened up entirely new avenues for
technology to change human behavior. Yet breakthroughs on this scale
are needed if technology vendors are to see their visions come true.
Those visions, remember, assume that people will increasingly connect
to the internet through devices other than the PC. These gadgets will
either have smaller screens, as with iPods, mobile phones or watches,
or larger and more remote ones, as with TV sets or even, perish the
thought, car windscreens.
Small screens require simplicity for two reasons, says Mr. Mercer. One is the "lack of real estate", i.e., very restricted space, meaning that not much fits on to the screen at one time. The other is that the method of input is different, because there is either only a tiny keyboard or none at all. Mary Czerwinski, a cognitive psychologist at Microsoft who calls herself the "visualization and interaction boss", has also found big gender differences. For whatever reason, women struggle with small screens, whereas men do almost as well on them as on PC monitors.
Large screens, for their part, require simplicity because they tend to be further away than a PC monitor and operated by a remote control, or because of the context in which they might be used. "Simplicity is a must-have when you're driving," says Jack Breese, Microsoft's research director.
Even for the traditional PC, however, a new interface is needed. The present "metaphor", in designer-speak, of a desktop surface was Apple's key commercial breakthrough that launched the PC era in 1984. This broad metaphor also lent itself to sub-metaphors, including object-icons such as a rubbish bin (also the work of Mr. Mercer when he worked at Apple in the 1980s), folders and files. Microsoft eventually copied these metaphors and brought them to the mass market, thus helping to make millions of computer users more productive.
But now that the internet era, in which everything is connected, is taking over from the PC era, in which computers were mostly isolated, these old metaphors are becoming increasingly redundant. PCs are turning into crowded repositories of family photographs, songs and e-mails alongside word documents and spreadsheets, and point to locations on their own hard disks as well as to computers far away. This is too much to keep track of on one desktop. "Making everything visible is great when you have only 20 things," writes Mr. Norman in "The Invisible Computer". "When you have 20,000, it only adds to the confusion. Show everything at once, and the result is chaos. Don't show everything, and stuff gets lost."
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