Synogenes.com

Whether you try to or not, you accumulate gadgets. The TV has a remote control, and so does the stereo, and the VCR/DVD has one. If you have a mobile you get at least two gadgets – don’t forget the charger. Then there’s a camera (and a charger), the MP3 player (and charger), then there’s the all-in-one charger that fits (almost) all the other gadgets.

As early as 1977 we were taught about recharging gadgets regularly with the tamagochi, little gizmos that needed care and attention and feeding with electricity, excellent training for the mobile phone. When we all learned how to play Solitaire and Minesweeper, we were almost oblivious to the fact that we were receiving mouse training. When the mobile came along, it was perfectly natural that it would need recharging.

In almost every case, the interface to these devices has been appalling. The drive to produce smaller and smaller devices means that unless you have eagle eyes and very nimble fingers, you are unlikely ever to be able to operate the menus on an MP3 player, a digital camera or one of the recent mobiles. But that’s not a problem for the manufacturers because it is overwhelmingly a young market – and the young have good eyesight and nimble fingers.

This is throw-away technology. Each year, or even more often, phones are thrown away and replaced, cameras are discarded, hand-helds are superseded with something which will now tell you not just the temperature in Tokyo but can provide you with expensive unwanted updates about arcane news items, and even tell you where you are. There is literally no point in improving the interface to the point where it will have long-term usability. Indeed, half the point is to occupy the user learning about the interface. By the time they have mastered it, they’ll be ready for and wanting the next one.

Have you ever seen someone texting someone on a mobile. They sit entranced peering at a tiny screen, thumbs twitching frantically trying to reduce the length of words sufficiently to be able to write a message at least halfway efficiently. The argot produced, a crude mixture of letters and numbers, missing vowels turning ambiguity into an artform, provides part of the learning/entertainment itself. The device itself is barely functional for the transmission of anything other than a short message – a message that could easily have been left on an answerphone in a much shorter time.

The tiny phones are equipped with a web interface. Now web pages need screen real estate because without the space, you can barely display anything. If you reduce the content to fit the size of the screen on a mobile, you have barely the functionality of a ticker tape. Even the business of clicking a link is problematic. Of course, some websites are WAP-enabled? Imagine you were connecting an early 80s computer to the web - now scale down the functionality, and you’re getting close. It’s a non-existent user experience.

In almost every case, the marketing hype has conned large numbers of people to jump on the bandwagon with under-performing, poorly-featured, largely dysfunctional devices. Of course, being able to make and take calls on the move is a great convenience, but the rest?

OK, so the user experience is not that great - so what’s next? Convergence… Instead of one gizmo, your device now contains a movie camera, sound download and playing, ability to play DVD clips, GPS, information feeds, and so on. You can’t actually see the video because it’s too small, and you haven’t time to listen to all the stuff you’re carrying on it, and most of the information feed is advertising gunk, and after taking twenty photos, you can’t see the point anymore, and you keep having to charge it… and it costs...

Despite working in the computing industry, I find myself more and more disconnected from the world of gadgets. A new TV/DVD player? I wonder nowadays whether the time invested in learning the interface is justified by what I might ever want to record and play. The drive to pack more and more features into a device leaves me wanting to avoid it, rather than spend time getting used to yet another gizmo.

I doubt that I’m alone in that. The accumulated frustration of poor interfaces and inadequate functionality is making me gizmo-averse. I long for screens I can read, keypads I can use, menus I can follow without a manual, terminology that fits my use rather than a marketing plan, devices that detect their environment and configure themselves or ask me sensible questions. I don’t want to spend my time learning an interface to a device that is designed to become obsolete, learning to be ready to consume the next version.

I’ve even found myself picking up a biro and a notebook. It’s not that we don’t have usability experts, excellent designers, people with creativity and subtlety – but the god of the marketplace sees us as mere revenue streams. There’s so much potential for improving the quality of life, but all we get is a continuous stream of rapidly obsolete techno-junk. The technology offers so much promise but the consumer market and the desperate grabbing of more and more cash from customers, means they are condemned to a stream of barely functioning cutting edge toys whose only value is the status of owning them. The brand without the content.