Elegance , system of logic , simplicity , economy : these are the cant that design eccentric person hold up for . If only all the gadgets and machine and feature laden wonder packages made signified then would n’t the human race be a good place ? And then we all nod and whine about how we do n’t recognise how to use two third of the features on our digital camera .
It sounds great , but there ’s a problem here : it ’s that , in fact , lots of appliance are design with elegance and logic in mind . It ’s just that people are n’t . People work out in funny ways , and some of the way of doing thing that they wish most are precisely the ones that do n’t make sense .
Take the omnipresent hierarchic menus of the digital camera world . God knows how much effort has been devote to set together just the right chronological sequence of menu press , machinate with Dewey denary clarity and maximum button positioning economic system .
The thing is , the great unwashed do n’t ask economy and logic . They want intuitiveness , which is not the same thing . They like dials and knobs . I have , for representative , an old ( film ) tv camera call the Pentax ZX-5n . That particular photographic camera , from the mid-90s , is something of a fetish item among interface connoisseurs . I give a premium for the old used television camera a class ago ; in fact , I paid more than I would have for a stain new Minolta or Canon . Unlike most autofocus cameras , the ZX-5n was build with controls that almost exactly mirror sometime manual focal point mannequin . There is an aperture dial , a shutter speed dial , and an exposure recompense dial .
Now is this more ordered or sparing than Canon ’s cleverly designed menu arrangement ? Hell no ! It ’s just plain more useable . It might sound messy on a spec sheet , but actual human being easily remember what boss or dial to turn for what . They do n’t easily remember what fare pick to navigate to . The reason why some of us are automatically soak up to older , humble tech objects like the Pentax ZX-5n is not because they are more “ logically ” design ( well , in some path they are , but we ’ll leave that apart for now ) but because they take advantage of easygoing , tactile intention cues that are actually much easier for real human beings to manage than nonobjective logical hierarchies .
There is not a single low end digital photographic camera model decent now that has an exposure recompense dial . This is middling amazing because , first , right photo is a lot more important with digital than with computer plastic film , second , the power to easily analyze and adjust exposure is one of the big advantage of digital , and finally , the basic opinion of making pictures light or darker is pretty darn easy for people to empathize . Even my mid-60s time of origin Polaroid has a lighten - darken bicycle . So , then , why not put in this kind of a dial ? ( Bonus manoeuver : it can automatically call up a histogram , too ! ) The answer , from the spot of view of a designer at an electronics company , is that it messes up the beautifully organized logic of his camera ’s menu system . It just does n’t make good sense , from the standpoint of logical system , thriftiness , elegance and simplicity , to have a bunch of disjoined telephone dial for ordinarily used features — especially if they ’ll actually parallel commands already available in the carte du jour system . Is n’t one basic , well-fixed to explicate organization for choose commands and features obviously advantageously ?
In a Holy Writ , no . soft to explain is n’t the same as prosperous to utilise . Logic is decent , but intuition is better . You wonder why people do n’t use the features on their digital cameras ? try on giving them some pommel to turn and switch to riffle . -Mark Gimein
CamerasFuture Tech
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