Feature: Information Appliances herald the New Usability

In May 2003, 1AD, the first international conference on appliance design, takes place at HP Labs in Bristol. The event is sponsored by the Appliance Design Network, an EPSRC funded project to generate new understandings and create new dialogues between technologists, product designers and interaction designers.

Appliances
Type 'appliance' into any search engine and, apart from pages on household devices such as washing machines, TVs and microwave ovens, you will come to realise that the term is being used in two senses: to refer to handheld organisers and other internet-specialsed devices such as emailers; and secondly, to refer to a new generation of networked devices which are based on the peripherals we know very well – digital cameras, telephones, printers, scanners and displays.

This second sense of 'appliance' in fact almost resembles that of everyday home appliances, but the emphasis is on information-based tasks, and the connectedness of devices.

This new and emerging area – appliance design – is focused on the development of devices which resemble home appliances in their narrow range of function and ease of use, but resemble computing devices in that they deal with information-based tasks.

The intersection of traditional appliances and computing is welcome from the point of view of creating usable consumer information-based products. The reason why everyday home appliances are easy to use and understand is that they are single function devices that do one thing very well; conversely, the reason why devices such as handheld organisers are hard to use and understand is they attempt to do many things – but on a platform which is reduced in utility, power and flexibility. As Bill Sharpe of the Appliance Studio Ltd suggests, the market has not been very receptive to these products, and one explanation is that from a user perspective they all live within the same user model as the general purpose PC, but compromise it in some way.

The key advance that has moved the new understanding of appliances into centre stage is a now ubiquitous communications infrastructure: both wired and wireless communications are accessible by almost any device (whether using Bluetooth, 802.11 or wired networking), meaning that there is a massive potential to connect devices up. This is more than the 'access your fridge from the internet' story, and is rather about making all those devices that were literally 'peripherals' the focus of attention.

The issue is, therefore, can we replace the single PC that does everything – and is consequently cumbersome and hard to use – with a range of interconnected narrow-function devices?

Key elements of appliances
In his introduction to appliances in the first issue of the journal Appliance Design, Bill Sharpe outlines the key elements in this emerging understanding of appliances:

* Everyday things and everyday skills: successful appliances are everyday things, requiring only everyday skills to use them;
* Direct Physical Interaction: appliances need to be simple and intuitive to use, and the way to do this is to organise the interaction around simple physical actions;
* Closure: successful appliances are those which support the notion of completion of a task – rather than an open-ended series of tasks, appliances embody simple, bounded tasks;
* Immediacy: appliances above all represent the ability to do something on impulse – rather than requiring detailed planning, appliances support tasks which are in the moment;
* Attention and Ambience: much interaction design assumes that users are engrossed in the interaction, paying attention and are facing a monitor. Appliances on the other hand are aimed at situations where the user may be engaged in another task, or where their attention is diverted;
* Peer-to-peer interaction: Finally, the key idea of appliances is that they work together without the need for central control or uploading and downloading.

Wizards
A recent example is a product family launched in 2001 called Wizard™ Web Signs™, developed by The Appliance Studio in the UK, the design consultancy IDEO and the US company Steelcase. Websigns are independent networked devices that present information in the workplace. Websigns can be placed wherever power and a network connection is available, and other devices which have a web-browsing capability (such as PCs, laptops, and internet capable mobile phones and PDAs) can be used to control what gets displayed and how the Websigns are managed, without additional software. Applications such as room-booking are embedded in the Websigns themselves, eliminating the need for the installation of any software on a network server.

The first member of the product family to be launched is the RoomWizard™, a display-based information appliance that is physically located outside a conference room. Red and green coloured lights signal whether the room is currently booked or available. The postcard-sized display shows the title of the meeting and who has booked the room, and what periods are available later in the day.

RoomWizards connect to the local network, and rooms are typically booked using a standard Web browser running on a PC. Each RoomWizard manages the bookings for its own room, and communicates with the other RoomWizards to build up a composite picture of overall room availability. Whenever someone wishes to make a booking they see the current picture. RoomWizards come complete: they don't require separate application software or servers. RoomWizards can be added to an existing network with minimal effort.

RoomWizards also incorporate a touch-screen, making it easy for staff to 'grab a room' for last minute discussions or meetings without going back to their desks. If the room is still free after a booked session, the booking period can be extended on the spot. At the end of a meeting, any unused but booked time can be released at the press of a button, allowing others to make use of the room.

Devices such as RoomWizards clearly present a very different model of computing than the standard PC. Located around the environment, working without central control, and allowing access to a small set of functions, these devices embody the elements that Bill Sharpe describes – they use everyday skills through direct physical interaction, have bounded and closed tasks, capture the immediate impulses of users, and are based on a peer-to-peer networked infrastructure.

Appliances and the New Usability
From the point of view of human-computer interaction, appliances present new challenges – and may require what I have called elsewhere a 'new usability' to address those challenges (see Thomas, P. and Macredie, R. D. (2002) The New Usability. ACM Transactions on Human Computer Interaction 9 (2): 69-73). Since appliances are essentially about designing products around human inputs and outputs rather than computer ones this means that devices such as cameras, printers, speakers or microphones that were formerly considered peripheral must become central in the design process. For an approach such as usability engineering – which matured and gained its character against a background of office-based personal computer applications – this presents considerable challenges.

Established usability engineering methodologies are ill-suited to these emerging technologies and applications and to the business contexts in which they will be developed and applied to the market. Businesses are struggling with unwieldy usability techniques in environments where the usability engineering issues are increasingly demanding and complex and are better conceived of as being about consumer experience than ease of use. The emerging systems and applications to which they are applied now have a broader user base, more and different uses, and have more demanding user expectations placed upon them. The 'user' is increasingly being replaced by the 'digital consumer' and the existing usability paradigm is unable to handle such a complex and multifaceted definition.

A reasonable expectation on the part of consumers is that new generations of products – such as information appliances - will be able to benefit from the knowledge developed in the usability community, and that well-established approaches such as usability testing will be of immediate relevance. But this is clearly not the case. For example, how is it possible to usability test an appliance which is based around new design requirements such as ambience or attention? Most usability testing regimes assume the context of a person facing a computer, the luxury of the person's full attention, a comfortable environment, with minimal distractions.

Information appliances on the other hand, need to work in low-attention situations, or where the user's attention needs to be fleetingly channelled through the appliance – while walking, talking, or any of the multitude of other day-to-day activities that would be routinely classed as distractions. Rather than being edited out of the context as they are in the usability laboratory, these features must be at the centre of understanding and designing these technologies.

Where we are now
Appliances are still a new concept, but one which is gaining significant attention as ways of exploiting the emerging ubiquitous communications infrastructure emerge. As Bill Sharpe again notes: 'We confidently predict that such an emergent order for appliances will appear in the industry over the next few years, but until then we need to get on with building useful products. This inevitably means working with the hodge-podge of communication standards, and doing whatever possible to provide a consistent, media oriented metaphor for the users to hide the complexity'.

What is required to drive this area forward, is multidisciplinary innovation in usage, business models, services and brand. As a consequence, a new discipline of appliance design is required to blend all the perspectives of physical, functional, interactive, graphical, and information design.

The First International Conference on Appliance Design (1AD), is the first international forum for the discussion of the new design discipline that will reach across historical and discipline boundaries. The aim of 1AD is to encourage a dialogue between disciplines – including product and industrial design, information design, interaction design, technology innovation and research in human-centered studies – which will help those traditional disciplines re-establish themselves in the new context, and so drive forward the an industry where users will increasingly assert their demand for products that fit into their daily lifestyles.

Call for papers on UN: 1AD: The First International Conference on Appliance Design.

Peter Thomas
peter@appliancedesign.org

(See also: Users as Designers - Challenge of the Network Age for another perspective on the usability challenges of information appliances.)

Associated Link: 1AD: The First International Conference on Appliance Design

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