Learned Inadequacy
Sean Moore
From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.
Fast Co Design’s Phillip Batin recently wrote about adaptive user experience, centering on a remote control for a television. The main idea is that the interfaces a touchscreen remote and on-screen overlays present to you could adjust themselves according to the amount of experience you have had with the system. As you acclimate yourself and acquire “experience points” from your interactions, to use the gamer parlance Batin states the idea derived from, the remote adds additional controls to allow you to use the more advanced behaviors of the TV. It’s certainly an interesting and unique idea.
It also happens to be complete bullshit.
Batin confuses complexity with ability, stating that Internet connectivity and embedded applications have made “operating a television much more complicated than it ever has been before”. But the advances in TV capabilities aren’t to blame for the poor user experience and hopeless mess that interfaces found on the smart television sets. After all, a smart TV is far less complicated – in the true sense of the meaning, this time – than a phone or a tablet or a computer, and yet no one is clamoring to put training wheels on our iPads and laptops.
Nor should they. Because despite the complexity of bridging the gap between human intuition and computational capability, we still manage to be incredibly productive with our processors and screens. And the reason why is that a great many designers, developers, and engineers have spent a great deal of time working to get the interaction right. Adjusting the computer environment to better suit our spatial capabilities. Perfecting the physics of systems to align our expectations with how we view external reality. And most importantly perhaps, designing the controls we interact with so that we aren’t completely flummoxed by how the applications we use actually work.
Worst of all, this adaptive system does nothing to address the fact that the interface you are teaching is still a complete piece of shit. If you need a twelve-step program to learn how to properly interact with the interface you designed, it’s not your users’ inability to master complexity that’s the issue. It’s your inability to properly explain and guide them, in zero steps. An interface should properly express the capability of the system it acts as an intermediary for, not slowly dole out possibilities at a slow and stead pace.
This isn’t to say that adaptation as a whole is unwise. In fact, the very smart phones that we carry in our product are already adaptive to our abilities and to our needs. By having access to an app store, we can choose the interface for a task that suits our particular needs, rather than having a singular company tell us how to learn theirs.
The market allows individuals across the spectrum of capability to select the app and the interface they find most effective, and it allows the best design to be chosen by the users, rather than the company.
As always, capitalism wins.