Sensorship

Back in the middle of the last century when I went to engineering school, we didn’t have a Human-Machine Interaction course offered, not even as an elective. I’m happy to see that’s changed somewhat and that some institutes of higher learning are offering such instruction, at least at post graduate level. I think knowledge of the field is desperately needed.

One recent Friday night, I picked up a new cell phone. (I was pushed to do so by text messages I was receiving from my service provider telling me that my old phone’s analog-type service would soon be part of technological history.) I then spent the weekend trying to educate myself about my new phone’s “intuitive” interface.

I finally had to break down and go to the help desk to find out how to disable a particularly annoying featurean audio beep that indicated the phone was searching for reception. Since I frequently go in and out of tower range in the remote areas of the Catskills where I pursue my piscatorial interests, the constant beeping was driving me nuts.

As it turned out, that feature can’t be directly shut off. What I had to do was turn off all sound and set the phone to vibrate mode. Then, I’d only be notified when events I really want to know about, like calls and text messages, caused the phone to vibrate.

In case your wondering, this wasn’t an iPhone. But with Apple’s latest consumer design getting so much free publicity, it won’t be long before competitors try to duplicate and surpass the iPhone’s capabilitiesand then things could get pretty crazy.

Design of personal electronics is fine in the hands of a person like Steve Jobs, who seems to have an in-born sense of how people want machines to interact with them. But what kinds of systems will we get when the capabilities made possible by modern sensor technologies are employed by less capable designers?

The iPhone uses sensors brilliantly. For instance, they determine the angle at which the phone’s being held and its proximity to the user’s ear and, based on that information, the phone either sets the display to portrait or landscape mode, or turns the display off.

But consider that when I move a phone away from my face, there are several possible things a smart device could do. It could turn on the mute function, change to speaker-phone mode, or automatically hang up. And those are things I might want it to do at some times and definitely not at othersfor example, when I’m on a call and want to check the time on the phone’s screen, I don’t want the phone to hang up, and when I turn to make a snide remark to the person next to me, I definitely don’t want to be on speaker phone.

Engineers are going to have to study long and hard if they want to develop next-generation personal electronics that meet people’s expectations and that they actually like using. And a consumer device’s likability is ultimately what determines its success.

Richard Comerford