An in-your-face interface

Last Christmas, my family chipped in to buy a portable cell phone and subscription for my father-in-law, who at age 88 still makes a 2-mile daily round trip to his university office. Whether he walks or drives, he never carries his new emergency phone. After a recent visit, I now know why.

The phone's user interface gets in its user's face.

To activate the phone, you press and hold the No key. To switch off the phone, you press and hold the No key. (Why didn't the designer use the nearby Yes key to switch on the phone?) When first switched on, the phone's tiny screen shows an eye-catching but totally useless 10-s animated sequence.

On my first attempt to dial a number, the phone refused to complete the call until I filled out the name of the person I planned to call. To spell names, you press digit keys a various number of times (e.g., press 7 once for P, twice for Q). According to the nearly useless user's manual (set in 8-point type with an incomplete index and a paucity of pictures), a different letter-entry method resides somewhere deep in another configuration screen.

Without much effort, I can find similar design blunders—non-intuitive control functions, gimmicky splash screens, Byzantine data-entry sequences, and poorly written documentation—in altogether too many of today's allegedly "smart" test instruments.

When tempted to perpetrate gee-whiz feature overloads, instrument designers would do well to examine the classics. For example, Hewlett-Packard's HP 1611A logic analyzer featured a handy pull-out reference card that resided in an under-chassis pocket. Tektronix's older oscilloscopes included users manuals that still earn praise as masterpieces of presentation and clarity.

Nowadays, memory is cheap, and help-menu authors should feel free to write complete sentences. Why not build comprehensive and, thus, truly useful instruction manuals into every "smart" instrument? While we're at it, let's include basic and advanced modes that make instruments adapt to the user's needs. The former would help me climb an instrument's learning curve, while the latter would save time if I frequently used the instrument.

Also, why force users to program an instrument via a limited keypad and hard-to-remember keystroke sequences? Why not provide a connector for the ubiquitous IBM-compatible PC keyboard?

As author Donald Norman notes in Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions Of Automobiles , engineers and designers are quick to blame the user when someone misuses a product—but most designers lack an extensive background in psychology and human-factors engineering. Until that situation changes, we'll all suffer from in-your-face user interfaces.

(To learn more about user interface design, visit Donald Norman's Web site: www.jnd.org.)