A shining example is an article that was recently published in The Guardian titled “My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots“. The protagonist launches into an array of annoying qualities about his phone that render it nearly unusable. In the event that he does manage to squeeze out a phone call, the process of fighting his way there leaves him flustered and angered. This experience has affected him so much that it has changed the way he looks at phones, and he is spreading the word.

This is a huge step forward from the days where someone would be confused by a horribly designed device and chalk it up to themselves being too stupid to understand it. This particular scenario happens regularly with elders and computers when they hear about all that can be done with a computer. Because they’ve never had a good experience to compare to, the arcane methods used to navigate these little boxes appear overwhelmingly daunting and complex. When it comes down to it, there is a very good reason that elders typically feel this way.

Computers are overwhelmingly daunting and complex.

Not without good reason, mind you. The amount that these little boxes can accomplish is quite impressive, and with a great amount of options comes an equal or greater amount of methods to use those options. These options, in modern day parlance, have come to be known as “features”. It becomes easy to forget that the more features a device has, the more difficult it is to operate. This is why it takes multiple people with years of training to operate the dizzying array of knobs, switches, levers, and dials on a Boeing 747.

Historically, the more features a device had, the more expensive it was to produce. This kept a check on how complex devices became, as soon people wouldn’t pay more for the features they didn’t want. People developed a shorthand of using “feature lists” to demarcate which devices were better than others, and advertisers jumped at this opportunity to quickly and easily have something in writing that made their product stand out. This worked well for everyone involved.

Then along came software. With this advent, the cost to add in things that would qualify as “features” reduced dramatically, as they only had to be created once, and could be freely duplicated. Suddenly we have email with tailored ads, phones you can watch movies on, and video games on everything with a screen. If it adds a bullet to the feature list, throw it in. Because this used to be the most efficient way to determine the best product, people instinctively pick the product with “more stuff” in it over the one that might actually accomplish what they want done.

As a real-life example, a calculator manufacturer recently had two models for sale with the exact same functionality; the only real difference was the model number. Yet one of these calculators was selling much more than the other. Curious, the company hired a research agency to find out why. The agency went into stores where the calculators were sold side by side, and watched people compare feature lists, try out the calculators, and repeatedly pick one over the other. Then they went up to the customer and asked why they chose the one they did. Many of the customers had no idea, some said they just went with intuition, and some explained their process.

After reading the boxes and trying them out, they held one calculator in each hand and comparatively weighed them. They picked the heavier one, because it must have “more stuff” inside.

This method of thinking worked well for centuries, but is painfully out of date today. The mentality that you are missing out by not cramming every possible feature into something you pay for is self-defeating. People forget that for every feature you add, there needs to be a way to access it. Quickly you have gadgets with screen after screen of options, and suddenly you can’t get past the kitchen timer and movie player just to place a call.

A few companies have been producing focused products that accomplish the best tasks for their job, making it a point to leave out features that only get in the way. However, people still using the old way of thinking hold this against them. People dislike the iPod with the reasoning that it doesn’t have an FM tuner. People scoff at the Wii because it doesn’t have a DVD player. They think that if every imaginable feature isn’t squeezed into a gadget, it is less desirable. On the contrary, every feature you add crams more into the same little space. Soon when you want to sit down, relax, and just listen to your music or play a game, you have to fight through all the stuff you thought you wanted. It is far better to have a simple, direct interface that will immediately do what you want almost before you ask. It doesn’t do everything, but what it does, it does well.

The article that I mentioned at the beginning touches on this, but still comes from the old way of thinking. The title of the article focuses on the features that are on the phone, and how horrible they are. As he launches into the article, his complaints focus not on the features, but how unusable the device has become because there are so many loaded on. I haven’t seen a simple, small phone without buttons on every side in years. I regularly hear people complain about this, so the market is obviously there, but not loud enough to drive things yet.

It’s easy to drive the products with feature glut into extinction. Buy the things that do what you want, not the ones that promise to do everything. They already have to give away the phone in the article. Let’s make sure they don’t get made at all.

Then along came Henry Ford and the assembly line. Suddenly you could guarantee that every part looked the same, felt the same, and worked the same. Quality control became easier, and production cheaper. Suddenly people found themselves in a flood of identical items, allowing them to quantitatively judge themselves against others. Keeping up with the Joneses became a national pastime. Appliances, cars, clothes, it didn’t matter. The brand of an item became a cachet, allowing people to quickly judge how someone viewed themselves by which of the assembly line products they chose.

Soon production became so inexpensive that it was cheaper to make a new widget than fix the old one. Objects became single-use items that had no long-lasting value or emotional attachment, and disposable culture was born. If something stopped working, you just threw it out and got a new one. Countless electronics don’t even have batteries that are removable, because they know it just isn’t worth it.

However, there is a backlash brewing. People want to have an emotional attachment to the items they have on them all the time. People want their belongings to have a sense of value to them, to be an extension of themselves. They put stickers over their computers, covering the vast flat expanses. They put a meaningful photo or cartoon as their desktop. They want others to know at a glance that this object belongs to them, that this widget is an extension of themselves and their personality.

Corporations are here to help.

Back in the heady dot com days, I bought a pair of Customatix [2000-2004, RIP]. You could go in and choose what kind of shoe you wanted, what colors, what style of laces, even which logo you wanted. The shoes had tags on the side that said whatever you wanted to have embroidered there. No longer did I have to choose from the oppressive colors and designs that the stores deemed worthy. I was free to create shoes that looked like whatever I wanted, and they would even be made in this country. It was win-win, and soon i had a pair of boots that advertised my website. It was much more subtle than it sounds, I assure you.

Now, more and more companies are going this same direction. Nike has spawned Nike iD, a site that lets you pick from most of their products and choose the colors you want in a clean, simple website that guides you through the process. Nike also owns Converse, which released Converse One, a nearly identical interface that allows you to design your Converse. Puma also lets you build your own shoes at the Mongolian Shoe BBQ, going for a completely different method, but with the same results. Puma used to only offer this directly in their store, digging through piles of fabric to pick the pieces you wanted to build your shoe with, and their website does a good job of approximating this. Getting a pair of shoes that express your personality has never been easier.

The world of customization no longer stops at shoes, however. It has been seeping into other quotidian items, like messenger bags. Timbuk2 offers a website that will let you personalize one of their bags with whatever colors you like. Freitag took it a step further, allowing you to “kill a truck” and rip apart the tarpaulin with stencils, picking exactly the area of fabric you want your bag to be built from. It’s amazing how detailed personalization is becoming.

Walking around wearing shoes and a messenger bag you designed yourself still isn’t enough for you? If you can no longer stand that pre-made watch on your wrist, Swiss watch manufacturer 121 Time will let you futz with the details of your own high-end timepiece. Fossil or Blancier will let you do the same, to varying degrees. Why drink what everyone else drinks when you could be sipping custom wine from Elite Vintners? Wearing all of these personalized items, you obviously can’t drive something that looks like what everyone else has, so Harley-Davidson will let you custom-build your own hog, all the way down to your choice of seat and tailpipe.

While riding around on your custom motorcycle, listening to what some snobby DJ on the radio thinks you should listen to is simply too oppressive. Thankfully, the BBC is launching MyBBCRadio, which will let you pick what kind of music you want to listen to. If you can’t wait, Pandora and MusicLens will let you do the same right now.

Enough about running through the daily rat race, what about personalized playtime with custom toys? There is always the Lego Factory, which will let you build anything you want out of legos. You can make your own Hot Wheels or Barbie if that’s more your speed. In any spare time, you can read a PersonalNOVEL created using the names of you and your loved ones as the main characters (providing you read German). And you can pay for it all with a custom credit card from Flexi, that not only lets you personalize how the card itself looks, but choose exactly what your terms of service are for your intricately individual life.

However, personalization doesn’t stop at physical objects, either. Snakes on a Plane recently launched a campaign that allows you to send a personal phone message from Samuel Jackson to a friend. Before long, on a whim we will be able to instantly personalize a touching and memorable song for those delicate moments in life. Just think of the possibilities.

Take your average glass drink bottle and make the top twist off. Suddenly the need for clumsy bottle openers on every vending machine is obsolete. Add a spring mechanism to the inside of a pen. You have removed the need for easily lost caps. Replace the rotary dial on a telephone with buttons and you eliminate the finger yoga and frustration associated with making a phone call. Some people still have a fascination with the old way, but these new technologies catch on quickly due to their inherent speed and usability.

One everyday item that has yet to jump the usability barrier is the daily cup of hot coffee or tea. There have been a flood of attempts to make these easier to use, including styrofoam cups, Java Jackets, and my personal favorite, the plastic lid. These lids retain heat, become soft and change shape, and force you to drink through a tiny hole that focuses the burning liquid onto one spot in your mouth. Due to their lack of usability, these lids now have warnings embedded all over them, thankfully included in braille for the blind. That is, providing they want to get second degree burns on their fingertips to find out the liquid inside is hot.

Enter Dynamic Textures. April Tsui has invented a new material that, when activated by heat or pressure, translates two dimensional patterns into three dimensional shapes. The result is a cup that emulates a pufferfish, with spikes that stick out, not allowing you to grab the cup and pour the possibly scalding liquid onto your tongue until it has reached a cool enough temperature to drink.

As effective as this is, some people may have an aversion to this technique, particularly those that hold their coffee between their legs on the morning commute. Thankfully, she also offers a more subtle approach to making sure you don’t accidentally pour your drink all over yourself. This variation of the material stays two dimensional until you have the lid on your cup securely. When your beverage is safe, the material pushes out to form the grips used to hold and enjoy your morning refreshment.

While these may currently be experimental projects, considering how many times I have been fooled by a cup into thinking it wasn’t a dribble glass, I would love having the latter design on my desk. Meanwhile, April has been working with NASA to translate these textures onto Aerogel, which could have some amazing new implications.

They may not know what the full possibilities are of combining these futuristic directions, but they know it’s worth looking at. It’s worth the time and effort of exploring and rethinking what they have in order to find solutions that are exponentially better. By spending the time to look at the objects and solutions you use every day, you can end up revolutionizing everyday life.

That’s when my friend asked me if I knew about John Maeda.

I didn’t.

My friend mocked a gasp, and reached into his bag to hand me some photocopied articles he had been reading. After our conversation, I sat down and began thumbing through the articles. Each one started with a short biography, the tale of a kid in a working-class family who had grown up with his parents stressing how important mathematics were, pushing him to study hard and strive to get into a university that they mentioned repeatedly as if it were a mythical place, nearly impossible to reach. MIT. It was not just a place of learning, it was the ultimate goal of achievement.

With a steady stream of dedication, this kid burned through years of courses in mathematics. It became a second language for him, a new way of seeing the world through numbers, variables, and complex equations, and how they all worked together in harmony to provide simple, direct conclusions.

As he neared the end of his high school career and it was time to choose a college, the decision had been made in his head for years. He applied, and was accepted. He immersed himself in all of the technology and knowledge that living in a hub of mathematic activity afforded him. He continued to work hard and develop his innate sense of formulas and algorithms, and as he became more and more advanced, he started discovering that he was slowly becoming less intrigued by the actual nuts and bolts of the mechanics of how mathematics worked.

Instead, he was growing entranced with the visual output of the solutions to his equations. The lines, diagrams, and shapes that were formed from repetitive calculations and computer programs started becoming lush, textured landscapes. He shifted his focus toward these images, and his professors immediately noticed his predilection toward the beauty of the results.

John Maeda’s “Infinity” (1993). 10,000 interconnected loops, generated by algorithm.

John stayed focused on the mathematics program at MIT, but developed more and more computer programs whose sole purpose was to generate a specific image he had constructed in his mind. He didn’t use real-time image editing tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, as they couldn’t handle algorithms this complex. Instead, he had to use his knowledge of mathematics to expand simple equations into flowering bursts of texture and color. He spent many long nights huddled in front of a computer screen, working on the code that could transfer his vision onto paper.

As John was working through the curriculum at MIT, he felt more and more like his purpose was different from the rest of his classmates. While he loved working in mathematics, his goal was not to get a numeric result, but to enjoy the representation of the results in their various possible forms. As he experimented with colors and repetition to eke out the most beautiful solutions, it occurred to him that he wanted to break away from the mathematics that now seemed so stifling. Instead, he wanted to focus on devoting himself to a classical training in the arts.

He hatched his plan of escape to leave the country, and flew halfway across the world to study at the Tsukuba University Institute of Art and Design in Japan. Before he left, however, a professor learned of his plans and pulled him aside. The professor advised him to do “something young”. “The classics,” he stated, “will be there when you are old and have the time to leisurely enjoy them.”

Maeda took this advice to heart, and incorporated his love of mathematics into his newly dedicated voyage into art. Soon he began developing complex interactive pieces that seemed simple, encouraging the user to play with them like toys.

John Maeda’s “Sunflowers” (2005). Repeating shifting segments of a single sunflower image.

When I read these stories, a wave of empathy rushed over me. I identified with his reasons, his experience, and his choices. The struggles he had gone through seemed so familiar, so similar to my own. The way he handled growing through different paths in life served as inspiration for choices I have made in life since, and I know many of the experiences I have been through wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for this tale of courage and determination.

John Maeda has since entrenched himself in the field of Interaction Design. He served as the Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab, started the Aesthetics + Computation Group to foster creativity in growing careers, and has written several books on interaction and media. He currently calls Maeda Studio his home, and you can see a wide selection of his work there.

The reason this all comes to the forefront right now is that for the last year he has been working on his “Laws of Simplicity”. Each law cuts down to a core truth about creating things that are well-designed, usable, simple, and most of all, fun. He has finally finished fleshing out all of these concepts into a book, appropriately titled The Laws of Simplicity.

I expect this book, like his others, to become standard reading for anyone creating things that require interaction with people. His writing is appropriately simple and light-hearted, getting across his points with explanations and metaphors that are identifiable and true. Check out his overview, with brief explanations of all of the laws. If it leaves you wanting more, get the book.

The piece he had been working on was the rounded top of a rather complex bulbous shape. He had been working on the shape as a whole, and keeping everything together was a long, complicated procedure, as changing one part would bend the rest out of shape. As a result, the natural topography of each model was a complex weaving of shapes that looked similar to a hillside landscape. He had taken to sanding and polishing the natural grooves from the machine to make each attempt look smoother, stating it would emulate the final product. He had gotten completely frustrated and went to a senior coworker for advice.

The senior person simply made one curve over the entire top. He sent it to the FDM, and the instant it came out, the coworker who had been so flustered stood slackjawed for just a moment, then said “I don’t need to polish this one, I know it’s perfect.”

As he held up the two samples, I saw the new one next to the muddy landscape of the other. The piece was clear and concise, just a series of growing concentric circles.

The simplest answer tends to be the best. Never be afraid to step back and do something the easy way.

I will be your host on this journey through the world of gadgets, design, interfaces, and usability. This is a place where simplicity is king, and cramming a bunch of unwanted features into a product won’t earn you any points. We live in a world where phones are the new truly personal computers and watches are pure accessory. Every day we buy new gizmos to make our lives simpler, and they come packed with so much stuff we don’t want that we determine we will never be able to use it correctly, and it becomes another piece of clutter making life more complicated. Soon we are surrounded by fancy inventions that have one specific use, but are so overwhelmed with options that they never get used.

Then we have the marvels of innovation. The simple devices that are unassuming, but very useful, and clever to boot. They don’t scream what they do, or even require manuals. Not only do they accomplish their task with ease, they are durable, comfortable, and will accomplish any other tasks you decide would be appropriate. These are the chosen ones that truly make life a more fun and usable place.

I make devices like these for a living, and I intend to get the most living out of my devices. I want to make sure the gizmo isn’t a novelty, and will still be useful even when it’s obsolete. Along the way, I will share daily observations about what it takes to make these things, as the simplest ones are typically the most complicated to make.

This site will be an ongoing exercise in usability as well, and should evolve to become better over time. You can currently subscribe to comment threads to be emailed if someone replies, and you can even quote them in your response, to avoid having to use some arcane numbering system. If it suits you, pick up an RSS feed of my updates to stay up to date. You can even read the site from your phone at http://wap.theusabilityofthings.com/ if you are a jetsetter. If you like an article, use the pictures at the bottom of each post to tell others about it on your favorite link aggregator site. So many options to make sure you are able to use the site, and I am always open to suggestions. Just hit the “Contact” section up top to send me your thoughts.

Keep the knowledge coming.