Introduction
“I
appreciate the seamless ease….”
That
statement is the inspiration for this post.
It’s from a letter a friend wrote me recently. The point isn’t that he sounds like a TV ad
(from the days when ad spokesmen were earnest instead of arch). The point,
rather, is that I found this simple statement oddly inflammatory. I asked myself why. And the answer is, I should find it inflammatory, and so should you. Ideally, all my friends would join me in mounting
a War on Convenience. If I can’t have
that, well, maybe I can influence a few readers.
A paradox
Of course I
was being bombastic and hyperbolic a second ago. Who doesn’t want convenience in his
life? But I think convenience is like
alcohol: it should be enjoyed
responsibly.
Paradoxically,
my worldview straddles two seemingly conflicting ideals: I’m a great lover of efficiency, but I bristle
at society’s infatuation with ease and expedience. “Wait,” you may ask, “aren’t efficiency and
convenience pretty much the same thing?”
Nope. When I say “efficient” I mean that I can get
something done exactly how I want it done in as little time as possible. (Often this involves doing a lot of work up
front, like creating macros for a software application.) When people talk about seamless ease, they’re
often referring to systems that are merely intuitive, such as a user interface
that can be grasped quickly, without any need for help menus or a manual. Some products are convenient because they
remove tedious steps; other products are convenient because they rescue you
from having to learn something.
I think it’s
widely assumed that where user interfaces go, intuitive is best. But this isn’t always true. Consider the computer keyboard: to be maximally intuitive, its keys ought to be
placed in alphabetical order. That would
make it easier for the first-time user, wouldn’t it? But of course this idea seems silly, since
typing efficiency is more important than making the keyboard layout straightforward
for the newcomer.
What’s even
sillier is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed to be maximally inefficient, to keep early typewriters
from jamming. The Dvorak layout I use was difficult to learn, but my long-term gains in efficiency were well worth
the trouble.
Low-lying fruit
The simplest
argument against the embrace of convenience is that it often requires us to
forsake quality. I give you microwave
popcorn: it’s certainly easy to make,
but a) it literally stinks, b) it’s more expensive than traditional popcorn, c)
it tastes pretty bad, d) it’s full of salt and fat, e) it’s full of chemicals,
and f) the excessive packaging is bad for the environment. The popularity of microwave popcorn makes me
embarrassed to be a member of the human race, considering that an air popper is
also extremely easy to use, and cheaper, and lets you control how much salt and
butter you add.
Whipped
cream in an aerosol can is also really convenient, but it’s more expensive and less
tasty than what you whip at home, and has the added problem of
unpredictability: it’s hard to tell when
the can is low on cream (or non-dairy “kreme” as it often is), so you never
know when you’ll foul up your sundae with the liquid dribble that comes at the
end. By whipping my own cream, I can
choose an organic product; whip only as much as I need; control the amount of
sugar; and save money.
But enough
of these convenient examples. I want to
get into the more subtle ways that, through our love of convenience, we sell
ourselves short without even realizing it.
The problem of control
Often, complicated
systems are made more intuitive, and sometimes more efficient, through a
simplification of the user interface and/or automation of repetitive operations. A little Cessna surely has a simpler
interface than a commercial airliner, though it often lacks that handy
autopilot feature.
Automation is
a fine idea in theory, but in practice, it’s only as good as its
execution. How accurate are product developers’
guesses about what should be automated and how?
Well, here’s
a horror story. My family was visiting
some friends in their lovely, sunny home in London. One afternoon, when our friends were out, I
thought, hey, my mother-in-law is always asking for a nice photo of my wife and
me. And here we had this great lighting,
so I suggested to my wife that we finally take the time to shoot a nice photo
together. My wife has a tendency to
close her eyes in photos, so it took us at least a dozen tries. Well, on the last day of our visit, our host
said, “Hey, why not give us some photos of your visit from your SD card?” Great idea!
So I took the card up to their Mac and stuck it in the card reader,
expecting that I could cherry-pick the best photos of both families. But to my surprise the operating system
seized control, copied every photo
off the card, and launched a little slide show, set to music. This might have seemed really helpful to a
novice computer user who hadn’t mastered file management software, but I was
appalled. The software must have chosen
to show the pictures in reverse chronological order, because the first two
dozen shots were of my wife and me. We came
off looking like the biggest narcissists you’ve ever seen.
Probably
there’s a way to tell the Mac not to automatically grab all the photos from an SD card.
But some systems don’t give us a choice.
We consumers often put up with this lack of control because we enjoy the
convenience of the overall product. I
see this problem most frequently in Internet-based systems, particularly when
the revenue model is more complicated than “you pay me directly for goods or
services.” Things are automated with
more than just the user’s experience in mind.
Here’s an
example: the Gmail Adsense engine, which
automatically produces custom ads based on my e-mail text, doesn’t exist to
serve me. Were I given the choice to opt
out of Adsense, I certainly would. I don’t
even use Gmail, and yet (as detailed here) my e-mails to Gmail users nevertheless produce these tailored ads I like it
or not.
But you know
what’s even worse than that? It’s when
we’re unaware of how convenience is costing us.
Consider LinkedIn: it’s very
convenient, and a great idea, and I’m glad that it’s free. But as I’ve only recently discovered, LinkedIn
does what it pleases with the information I give it. Awhile back, because my profile photo was
like five years old, I put up a new one.
(The idea was anti-vanity: I didn’t
want people to think I was using an old photo just to look younger to the world.) To my embarrassment, LinkedIn contacted my
400 contacts on my behalf: “Dana Albert
has a new profile picture!” As in, “Dana
Albert, devoted curator of his own image and his self-important notion of an Albert
‘brand,’ wants you to see his latest self-portrait!” A few people responded, perhaps snidely, “Nice
picture!” How embarrassing. (Yes, I am easily embarrassed. What can I say … I’m an introvert.)
But that’s
not all. I’ve come to find out that
LinkedIn evidently does something special for their newer users: they send an update anytime one of the user’s
contacts has made new connections. Since
I don’t get such updates, I’d never have known about this behavior, except a
couple of friends commented. (“Wow, I’ve
see a lot of LinkedIn updates on you lately … did you lose your job or
something?”) Once I looked into it, I
figured out how to change these settings, but it wasn’t easy—which means that
those who thrive on convenience will probably just accept the default
behavior. (Surely I don’t need to go
into the various ways Facebook has surreptitiously exploited their users’
tastes, preferences, and purchasing data.)
Are your choices my business?
“Fine,” you
might say, “Go whip your own cream, and type on your weird keyboard, and shun
Facebook, if that’s what floats your boat—but let me do as I please.” In other words, you might wonder why your
behavior is any business of mine. Here’s
why: other people’s behavior often
affects what choices are available to me.
Here’s how
that happens. Because I worship
efficiency, I enjoy figuring out how to make a complicated process go quickly—but
not everybody enjoys this process, and manufacturers know it. New products are often targeted at teens and
young adults (to build brand loyalty early), so new consumers’ habits can have
an immediate influence on industry. Streamlining a process, modern consumers believe, should be figured out by the
manufacturer and baked into the product.
Thus, the focus is outward on the product, rather than inward on the
user. It’s not “How can I get better at
this” but “How can this be better for me?”
The “smarter” our products get, the lazier we’re
permitted to be.
(Fortunately,
schools are still essentially old-school.
If it weren’t for teachers making kids learn math, do you think these
kids would bother, given the ease-of-use of smartphone calculator apps? And yet, once you’ve learned arithmetic, it’s
faster to do it in your head.)
The result
of this consumer/producer dynamic is that perfectly valid products are often
kicked to the curb. Consider the manual
car transmission, aka stick shift: is it
straightforward? Not very. Is there a benefit to learning how to work a
clutch? I think so. After all, a manual transmission offers better gas mileage, and enables me to roll-start the car if my
battery is dead. My mastery of manual
shifting impresses the ladies, and enables me to rent a car in Europe. The popularity, in this country, of automatic
transmissions didn’t used to affect me, until that choice became so ubiquitous
that some foreign car companies stopped exporting their stick-shift models
here. When I bought my last Volvo, I
couldn’t get one with the transmission I wanted. I had to settle for an automatic.
(By the way,
that bit about impressing the ladies?
Yeah, that was a joke. Just
seeing if you’re awake.)
Another example: digital cameras. What a great invention, and yet the camera
industry is really suffering. You know
what the number one camera is today? The iPhone. It’s easy to see why: you’re carrying
your phone anyway, so why carry another device?
The problem is, phone cameras are not nearly as good as regular digital
cameras—even the more humble point-and-shoot ones. A phone camera takes inferior pictures
because the lens is too small and doesn’t let in enough light for non-flash
photography in low-light conditions. Phone
cameras also lack a zoom (their so-called “digital zoom” is pure malarkey—cropping
masquerading as telephoto).
Look at
these two photos. The first was taken with
a $200 Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera.
The second was with a Motorola Droid phone of the same vintage.
The point-and-shoot photo is much better, and not because I got out a light meter, set the F-stop, adjusted the shutter speed, etc. It was as easy to snap as with the phone (easier, actually, because there’s way less delay at the controls). The only convenience I gave up was having everything in one device.
If the camera industry were healthier, I’d have even better products available to me, and at lower prices (due to economies of scale). Alas, the market for standalone cameras has been strangled by the ubiquity of camera phones—the more convenient choice.
If the camera industry were healthier, I’d have even better products available to me, and at lower prices (due to economies of scale). Alas, the market for standalone cameras has been strangled by the ubiquity of camera phones—the more convenient choice.
Whom does convenience benefit the most?
Sometimes
the person who seems like the most direct beneficiary of convenience-oriented
technologies actually isn’t. Consider
the grocery store UPC reader: it’s very
intuitive, and thus perfect for bringing new cashiers up to speed quickly. It’s also more efficient, but this benefit
does not accrue to the cashier, who is paid by the hour. The system’s efficiency doesn’t mean the
cashier gets a raise; it means he or she is easier to replace, and the store can get by with fewer checkout stations.
Now let’s
move beyond human consumers and consider other consumers, like cattle. Being kept in a small stall in a feedlot is
certainly convenient for the cow, in terms of her basic need for sustenance. Of course this diet causes all kinds of
trouble for the poor animal, but her well-being was never the point. The convenience of the feedlot mainly
benefits the meat packer. Since this
arrangement translates into lowered operating costs, which can be passed along
to the human consumer, it looks like a win-win. So it is with cheap, high-margin products
like soft drinks and sugary cereal. Needless
to say, in the long term this convenience isn’t benefiting the human consumers,
either. The countless Americans who buy
junk food and frequent fast food chains are basically backing in to their own
feedlot stalls.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical
companies grasp that there’s big money to be made in drugs that treat lifestyle
ailments, and doctors prescribe these drugs because doing so is so much easier
than trying to get people to exercise and eat well. Consumers participate in this lowest-price,
lowest-effort economic model without an appreciation for its real costs. The companies at the top in this economy are
the direct beneficiaries of our rampant convenience addiction; by indulging it,
they introduce a variety of societal ills.
In this regard, convenience is like secondhand smoke.
Convenience and parenting
If you’re a
parent who has made it this far into my essay, I doubt you’re the kind who
feeds his kid soft drinks, sugary cereal, and fast food. But addiction to convenience is also present
in the most upscale of products. I’m
talking about PCs, smartphones, tablet computers, and Netflix.
It’s more
convenient to park kids in front of the TV or PC than to try to get them to
help with dinner or with setting the table.
It’s easier to let a kid use his iPad in a restaurant, while his food
gets cold, than to teach him how to behave like a grown-up. So kids and their parents become
co-dependents in a family dynamic that ultimately favors no one.
I won’t lie
and say I never give in to such temptations.
But when I do, I don’t pretend I’m being a good dad. “Shall we sit our kids down in front of a
video and let them rot their brains out, just to get them out of our hair?”
I’ll ask my wife. And I’ll say to my
kids, “Would you like to put in a video and let your brain be automatically
extracted?” This raises awareness and may
help us fend off bad habits.
Do modern
kids have the mental space required to daydream? I’d guess a lot of them don’t. So when my kids complain that they’re bored,
I say, “Good. It’s good to be
bored.” Necessity being the mother of
invention, boredom is a good problem for the mind to solve. Solving this problem with a library book, a blank
piece of paper, or some random household detritus doesn’t do much for the
economy, but the economy is not my problem.
“But wait,”
you may protest, “Computers can be very educational!” Yes, they can, but that doesn’t mean just any
computer-based activity is intrinsically useful. Too many parents pretend their Internet-addicted
kid might become the next Mark Zuckerberg—because this fiction is more
convenient than fighting with the kid about limits on his or her screen time.
My wife and
I are all about limits. This is why we
don’t have cable, our kids don’t have phones or tablets, and their PC time is closely
monitored and rationed.
“Okay, fine,”
you might say, “You’ve identified some troublesome trends, but how are the
habits of other families any of your business?”
Well, where the hell are my daughters going to find husbands? My kids won’t settle for a passive, inert, pasty,
video-addled mouth-breather who doesn’t read.
Meanwhile, the boys out there won’t settle for out-of-touch,
pop-culturally illiterate nerds who don’t even text. Sure, there are some boys out there whose
parents are just as socially unconventional as my wife and me, but it’s a small
pool.
Call to action
If you
disagree with all of this, that’s fine—and I thank you for at least reading it.
On the other
hand, if you agree with me, you may wonder what I propose to do about this rampant
convenience addiction. The answer is
simple (though not easy). Next time you
appreciate the convenience of something, ask yourself if that convenience came
at any great cost to you: to your
privacy, to your health, to your family, or to the environment. Then ask yourself if it’s worth it. I’ll keep on doing the same.
And at a minimum, if you find yourself using the phrase “seamless ease,” please don’t say it like it’s a good thing.
And at a minimum, if you find yourself using the phrase “seamless ease,” please don’t say it like it’s a good thing.
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