ALKHOBAR, 22 August 2006 — Most people who read this column each week have some familiarity with technology. Sending an e-mail or taking a digital photo is probably a commonplace occurrence for all of you. It’s the same for me too of course. My life began in the time before the PC and mobile phone, but I have only a hazy recollection of those days. I am a true believer in the power of technology to transform our existence.
That is why it is very important for me to reach out to the developing world. There are several billion people on our planet with little or no connectivity. I can only imagine how their lives could be changed if they had the opportunity to join the global community. Numerous initiatives are moving forward with the goal of introducing technology to people everywhere and there is every hope that in the next decade the majority of people on our planet will be connected.
But it’s not enough. This year it became horribly apparent to me that even in societies where connectivity is taken for granted, some people are not being given the opportunity to join in the technology revolution. Others can’t keep up and are eventually being left behind. I have seen that this is in part because we as the consumers of technology are willingly accepting the poorly designed and badly conceived products dumped on us by IT vendors.
I have a friend, Miriam, who has a master’s degree in psychology. A former university lecturer, she is now retired, living alone and increasingly isolated from the world. In the 1980s, Miriam used a PC at work, so she is not unfamiliar with technology. Miriam came to visit me in Saudi Arabia this summer and she taught me a lot about the technology I use daily.
The second morning Miriam was with me, she saw me using Google. I quickly came to understand that she had never used Google. I sat Miriam down in my chair and explained how the search engine functioned and did a quick demo of its features. Miriam was fascinated. First we Googled her name. She was startled at all the information that appeared. We had to check out at least a dozen of the sites that listed information about her dating back at least a decade or two. Then, noting the links to some of her relatives and friends, we looked at those sites and soon we had moved on to view the web pages of organizations of interest to her.
Miriam was so excited with the experience that she went to write letters to her friends about it. After she left my office, I sat for a while just staring at the screen. The previous two hours had made me painfully aware of how poorly the Internet works. With me by her side, Miriam had been able to navigate the web easily. She would never have been able to manage if I hadn’t been there.
Broken links, websites that loaded poorly and the lack of uniformity at any site, were just a few of the problems we faced. As someone who uses the Internet 10 hours a day, I could quickly redirect our efforts, keep the process flowing and let the Internet flower before her eyes. In truth, there was nothing natural or intuitive about the entire experience. In the first few moments we tried it, I saw that Miriam was losing enthusiasm for the “search” concept because its functionality was so unwieldy. I pulled a chair up behind her, put my arms around her to reach the keyboard and told Miriam just to pretend that she was using my hands by remote control. She just spoke out whatever she wanted and didn’t nor worry about how it got to the screen. For Miriam, that’s when the fun started.
Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. The thought that Miriam was telling her friends about her “Google” experience in letters instead of e-mails was too much to bear. It turned out that Miriam didn’t have an e-mail account. Neither did most of Miriam’s friends. In addition to all the problems with the Internet that must be faced in retrieving and sending e-mail, there was also the keyboard mess to deal with. Christopher Latham Sholes invented the Qwerty keyboard in 1875 and we are still using it in 2006. To make things even more confusing, most keyboard manufacturers add on all sorts of weird keys to the basic Qwerty arrangement. I am a touch typist and use even my right hand cursor arrow keys while focused on the screen image, but using my keyboard to type out an e-mail, my friend Miriam was forced to rely on one fingered “hunt and peck mode.” It took forever to send one mail.
The keyboard issue can affect even me if I am forced to send mail from an Internet cafe. The basic alphabet keys will be in the same position on the keyboard but everything else is moved around. It’s definitely annoying. And what about mobile phones? A few months back on a trip through London, while making my way out of the airport, I was accosted by a group of older ladies. They were on a tour of England but their driver had not arrived at the airport to pick them up. They needed help and seven mobile phones were pushed at me to make calls to their contacts and report their predicament.
I have a geekish nature so making a few phone calls should not be a challenge for me, but it was. Visiting England, these women were carrying handsets from Mars — well not Mars exactly, but the USA — same difference. In the first place, most of the handsets wouldn’t work because they were CDMA, not GSM. Plus, they were tied to a Stateside provider. Just try to explain that situation to a bunch of frantic women. One woman had been provided with a “special” phone by a relative and amazingly I realized that it was ringing. Unfortunately, it only rang twice and went to voicemail. After what seemed like forever, I was able to access the voicemail and it was the driver looking for them, but there was no telephone number and the message was garbled. Under the received numbers list in the phone the number was “unknown.”
“Not a problem,” the woman said. She had her daughter’s phone number and her daughter had all the contact details for the tour operator. The woman dug around in her purse for a moment and pulled out a battered address book. She showed me her daughter’s number in the book. “Could you dial it for me?” she asked. It turned out that she couldn’t see the keys on the handset to dial the number. Once the call got through, I still had to talk to the daughter and explain the situation. The noise level in the airport was too high for the woman to hear her daughter’s voice in the handset. It turned out that the tour guide was waiting at a different meeting point and had been desperately trying to find the group. Like a mother hen, I guided everyone to the proper location, and then considered how silly the whole experience had been.
Why don’t we, as the consumers and utilizers of technology, speak up and tell IT vendors that we are fed up with trying to train ourselves to use their technology? Why are mobile handsets being turned into miniature mainframes capable of taking over the world? It’s supposed to be a phone for goodness sakes! On most handsets the keys are the size of pinheads and even with the volume on maximum, in a noisy environment, on both sides of the connection, shouting is the required communication mode.
IT vendors should immediately rethink the concept of “upgrade.” If a company makes its hardware or software more complicated and difficult to use, it should be illegal to claim that the product has been upgraded! A true upgrade is when an application can be learned faster by a novice user and its functionality is more intuitive to individuals without engineering degrees.
For some time now there have been predictions that the printed word is doomed, but I believe that its demise is still far off. Fortunately, any person who has been taught to read can open a book, turn its pages and be informed. Reading English, a person looks to the top left corner of the page and reads to the right and down. They read the book from the far left pages to the far right ones. Every person who has ever learned to read English knows this and the print in every English book is arranged in this manner. Perhaps the people who develop IT could learn a thing or two from books.
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