As much as I love technology, it also frustrates me. Innovative hardware has made my life simpler - i.e. microwave, cellphone - but there's a dark side to progress: Technology has become so complicated, I wonder if the designers ever remembered the audience for their products.

Imagine if everything designed today was tailored to you. Not to geeky tech wunderkinds with encyclopedic knowledge of megapixels and lithium-ion batteries. Not to teens who wrongly believe "more is more.”

What should be mandated for all companies intent on surviving in the tech market is the inclusion of human-tech or cognitive engineering - creating products with human nature in mind, not the bottom line.

This may sound familiar to book readers. University of Toronto professor Kim Vicente wrote a fascinating book on this subject called The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology, garnering a National Business Book Award in 2003.

Illustration by Adrian Hayles


Vicente outlines how some gadgets may be well designed physically, yet fail to relate to users in a way that makes the experience painless. For example, a few years ago Mercedes-Benz offered a feature on its E320 model that let drivers check their oil electronically. Smart, you think, because the driver doesn't have to pop the hood and find a dipstick.

There's a catch: The electronic oil-checking process involved five steps, the latter three making little sense (Step Five: Press the odometer reset button twice. Why?).

Vicente pounces on this example to impart a rallying cry for all dissatisfied consumers: "We're being asked to live with technology that is technically reliable ... but that is so complex or counterintuitive that it's actually unusable by most human beings."

It doesn't have to be like this. We control technology; it doesn't design itself. We don't need a panel of 15 buttons on our DVD player, as much as we don't need a digital camera that takes an hour to figure out. In an ideal world, manuals would be a quick two-pager about the functions of the essential features, and not a tome that loses our attention after the first mention of "configure.”

Products should trump their predecessors, yet also be easy to use. Vicente calls this human-tech thinking, since it merges the best advances of innovation with design both ergonomic and user-friendly.

From a business slant, companies must consider human psychology when they release products to the market. As varied as our needs may be, we all want technology that is effortless and effective, but today marketing strategies lean toward the specs-obsessed section of a consumer's brain: "More settings, increased contrast ratio, new ringtones!" Instead, and I know it's a wild idea, why not decrease the bells and whistles heaped on hardware? Function over form should be the new mantra for tech businesses.

To be fair, hundreds of products link human nature to new hardware. The PalmPilot won over consumers after years of feature-heavy PDAs, and like any adaptive business, Palm's designers looked at market research to improve the functions. They learned that users wanted to press one button to synchronize their information on the PDA and the PC. They also shrank the Palm's size to better fit in a user's pocket. The result launched the Palm into an industry leader that has been heavily copied - a corporate sign of flattery.

More recently, Guidance Interactive Healthcare has designed a blood glucose meter that plugs directly into Nintendo's GameBoy Advance. Kids run from medical devices, but they cling to mobile gaming gizmos. Why not merge the two and add an interface that downloads games onto the device as a reward for maintaining good blood-sugar content? This product skirts "feature creep" - when features overwhelm a device's usability - and targets a market niche in need of innovation both attractive and effective.

There are signs that human-tech engineering is being taken seriously. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in California holds an annual conference and organizes a user- centred product design award competition; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has published its Human Factors Standard manual online, in relation to designing medical devices; and tech companies such as Intel hire anthropologists to travel the world to see how different cultures relate to computing.

This amounts to a step in the right direction, but it's short of a giant leap. Building successful products should centre on meeting human needs, rather than mechanistic goals, and it should be a practice adopted by all companies. If technology is ever going to be one of those words that we celebrate rather than curse, a uniform shift in attitude must occur.

(David Silverberg can be reached at silverberg@businessedge.ca)