My boy turned nine on Tuesday. My little sister’s birthday is Saturday, and mine is Sunday, so we again observed the tradition of the tripartite birthday party for Zach, Beth, and Tim.

Zach scored the long-coveted Zelda: Wind Waker, a new skateboard, and some other goodies. Beth, some house wares, as befits her August wedding. I got the new Ten-In-One Atari 2600 unit–well worth a blog entry in itself–and a Speed Racer DVD of episodes 1-11. Needless to say, this is a birthday for Son to learn what Father used to do for fun. I can’t remember if I was eight or nine years old when I got an Atari 2600 for my birthday, and I’m sure Speed Racer re-runs were past heavy rotation by the time I was nine, but the retro character of Birthday #31 remains: here’s how Dad kicked it old-skoo.

In the beginning of Speed Racer Episode II (The Great Plan Part II), Speed reviews the features of the Mach 5. The steering column is home to seven buttons that activate the more advanced, Bondesque functions of the car: the jumping skids, the traction wheels, the rotary saws for driving through dense forests at high speed, the homing robot, and so on. What stuck me is how these buttons are labeled: A is for jumping, B is for traction wheels, the centrally located, prominently-sized G button is for the homing robot.

Let that sink in: A for jumping. B for traction. G for homing robot.

What?

It occurred to me what strides we have made in man-machine interfaces in the 40 years since Speed Racer was first drawn. I was no highly skilled computer scientist in the late 70s when I was watching this cartoon on TV, but it seemed totally natural then to me–and I suspect to other, perhaps more mature viewers–to label buttons on a machine in this fashion. I mean, hey, there’s seven buttons, so we’d better put labels on them, right? That way, people can remember what they do. Let’s see…how to label them? Meh, letters’ll do. It’s simple: want to jump? Press A. Anybody can do it. Jump? A. A? Jump. Incredible technology at the push of a button. And so easy to learn. Homing robot? G! It’s that huge button in the middle. How hard is that?

Well, of course not hard. The effort and talent required to memorize the function of seven pushbuttons is much smaller than that required to drive a car like the Mach 5, win fights with gangs of thugs twice your size, keep Spridle and Chim-Chim safe when they stow away in your trunk, help Trixie recover from repeated airplane crashes, and struggle to please the surly, emotionally aloof Pops after his rejection at the hands of his former employer and the earlier estrangement of your older brother, Rex, who was to carry the family banner as a world-class racer, but left instead to pursue a life of intrigue, only occasionally dropping in anonymously to help you out of a really nasty jam, then to drive off in the distance before you could really tell who he was. The buttons were just not that bad.

But still, we seem to have come up with a better way. Today’s Mach 5 wouldn’t have five buttons labeled A-F, surrounding a larger central button labeled G, with a function assigned to the central button that is anything but commensurate with its preferred position and size on the console. We might still place the buttons on the steering wheel, or we might not. Wherever we put them, they would be in a place that was both easy to see and easy to reach, given the driver’s need to look at the road and operate other controls inside the car. And more importantly, their size and position relative to one another would reflect their relative importance, consequence, or frequency of use.

We seem to have repented fully of that counterintuitive human interface paradigm that is best exemplified by labels like “B” on anything other than a keyboard key that emits a letter “B” when pressed. The traction-tires button would no longer have an arcane code on it, meaningful only to those who have taken the time to memorize the translation. Now it would have an image representing the function of the button. It would bear an icon representing “traction.”

But here we come to the problem with modern interface design: we want to use intuitive images to represent meaning, because as Kenneth Myers points out, images communicate not cognitively (thinking takes too long when you need to jump your car over a giant culvert), but intuitively and immediately. However, they are not always very good at communicating abstract ideas or subjecting ideas to any kind of analysis. An icon of an opening folder, a floppy disk, a printer, and a magnifying glass on a sheet of paper have fairly intuitive meanings in the toolbar of a rich text document editor. Only nominal training is required to teach people what these buttons do, and the intuitive pictures make their functions very easy to remember. But what about an icon for accepting document revisions suggested by a collaborator? Worse: what does traction look like?

Of course, this is why we have graphic artists. Sufficiently imaginative thinkers usually can come up with something vaguely evocative of the abstract concept behind the control. We ought only expect a slight mental foothold on which to stand while forming the association between the action and the control used to effect it; to wit, a picture of a hiking boot on a rock is probably better than the letter “B.” At least we are trying. And I think the direction of the results is promising.

Even programming source code has been affected by this drive for perspicuous interfaces. Twenty years ago, the BASIC or Pascal source code listings in the programming magazines (and they were all programming magazines back then, and none was too good to pass over an article on soldering technique) would have had variables with names like A and B (and don’t forget A1 and B1!), and no one would have thought anything of it. It was no big stretch to remember the purpose of what was stored in A, over against the purpose of what was stored in B. After all, the listing was only 20 lines long, and only used four variables. Try that in a professional setting now, and you’ll find yourself laughed (or beaten) out of a code review.

So as I was saying, Zach turned nine on Tuesday, and I turn 31 on Sunday. He will never think to label a button “G,” if the button’s purpose is to send a bird-shaped robot into the air. Me? I’m getting there.

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• Posted by Tim on Thursday, June 12, 2003 at 6:20:29 pm PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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