The Bradford Report

by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting

For many years universities have taught computer science students more than they ever wanted to know about Human Factors (Human Factors is the art and science of creating software that is intuitive and easy-to-use). Inevitably or in some cases, eventually, these students graduate and go to work for companies that create “feature driven” products in preference to “usability driven” products. Most computer science graduates have the knowledge they need to do good design work but they are rarely asked to apply this knowledge.

So, after a quarter century as a usability evangelist, I am throwing in the towel. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em as my grandfather used to say. In the next paragraph or two I am going to define a new discipline that I am calling “Inhuman Factors.” Inhuman Factors acknowledges that many products are complex, hard to understand, and never reach the point of being fully debugged. Inhuman Factors takes the view that difficult to use products will be the norm for the foreseeable future.

To illustrate the argument let’s pick on Microsoft for a moment. The Microsoft Office suite had humble beginnings. Their word processor was originally intended to replace the typewriter. Their presentation system (PowerPoint) was offered as a replacement for transparencies and overhead projectors. Their spreadsheet application was built to replace the bookkeeper’s humble ledger. In just a little over a decade these applications have grown to such monstrous feature-driven complexity that the company now oversees a certification process to identify those hardy souls who have actually managed to figure things out. Talk about making a virtue of necessity! This is the most brazen spin for bad design since Heinz claimed that their ketchup was hard to pour because it was “rich.”

One of the classic signs of a poorly designed user interface is a wide disparity between experts (power users) and the rest of the user population. Many years ago I worked in the R&D division of a large telecommunications company (now bankrupt – not my fault). I was part of a department that developed a very complicated in-house computer aided design tool. We did an after-the-fact usability assessment for this system and discovered that the most productive user was nearly 20 times as productive as the least productive user (a 2,000% difference – the least productive user took nearly a month to do what the most productive user managed in a day).

This is where Inhuman Factors comes in. Through a process of task and workflow analysis, through the development of meaningful cognitive models, and through the creation of useful exemplars, Inhuman Factors will do formally what that high performing user did intuitively. Inhuman Factors will deploy many of the same tools as traditional Human Factors but with a contrarian goal – the creation of virtuoso users who can take existing software applications to the heights of productivity that the sales force originally promised.

Please check back in the coming months as I elaborate on the theme of Inhuman Factors. Comments and suggestions are welcome.