Vox populi, Vox Dei

The voice of people is the voice of god. The motto of the Roman Senate is nowhere as valid today as in the software industry. As the influence of computers pervades every aspect of modern life, it becomes imperative that IT systems, which till now mainly are seen as "geek bastions", turn into accessible tools for the common person. The key challenge here is to considerably reduce the steep learning curve that novices have to face.

Engineers (like me) might object to this whole debate saying that the user interface has come a long way since the days when using a computer implied typing commands on the command prompt. Having come from that background, they fail to estimate how difficult it is for a tyro to even comprehend basic principles of computing. One reason for this high learning requirement is the richness of features that many of the common software products possess. Consider this simple scenario -

"A Martian is given a plug which is connected to a bulb and is taken near a socket, how long will it take him to figure out that once he puts the plug in the socket and inverts the switch position he gets light. And to it compare him trying to make a written text bold in Windows Word, probably the most used software".

Word is more difficult to learn than switching on the light because of the multitude of choices that the user faces when trying to accomplish the very basic tasks. The above probably is a measure of the nature and magnitude of the work that needs to be done to make computers the ubiquitous entity, which everybody expects it to be in the near future.

Economist, the UK daily has brought out a special report on the dual conundrums of reducing the complexity of IT systems and defining intuitive and usable interfaces. The two largely go hand in hand. The report goes on to demonstrate that the complexity of computer systems is a dual bane - it reduces the efficiency of people using it and it costs them more to maintain them. To it I should add, it costs them more when they buy it. The future challenge therefore lies not in adding new functionality but to define concrete, intuitive and extensible interfaces for the end users.

This turn for a simple usage should I believe stick to what Einstein once said, "Things should be made as simple as possible. But not more". Simplicity does not imply reducing the smart things engineers do today make the systems work. It implies hiding them. And this task of hiding is techinically more challenging than putting it all there on the top. One does not have the cushion of asking the user things that he does not have to do but are still necessary. It might also imply giving more floor space to basic features so that once the software is started what is to be done just stares at your face. It also means that a consumer should be able to add on to his existing product any additional functionality without much of an overhead in time or expense.

Tragically, such a switch could spell doom or atleast the end of the hegemony of big few in the IT industry. Simplifying products would be tantamount to courting competition. Once interfaces become simpler and the basic functionality less you do not need a huge corporation like Microsoft to write something like MSWord. Or you would not need scores of Infosys employees to maintain the decades old mainframes. Nevertheless, as Google founder Sergei Brin would probably say, "This is the good way to do things"