Humane defaults
I’ve been hustling recently to get a manuscript done, dealing with all the minutiae a lead author on a large study has to deal with: calls to coauthors, endless rounds of ‘final’ edits, the political calculations of which journal to submit to, etc. Now that it’s all done, my spirit feels broken, and I’m having trouble throwing myself into the other dozen things I should be doing. Was it always thus for scientists? Was life always a set of wind sprints, from one paper to the next?
I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I shan’t revisit all that that, lest the reader think I’m just whining. But I want to comment on one particular facet of this conspiracy to keep the whole world facet. A teeny facet really, but one that seems so basic it still puzzles me. My cell phone rings repeatedly, and its shrill default tone pierces the air. An email arrives in my inbox, and the computer hums a tone that sounds so self-important, you’d think God himself had emailed me. I’m no technophobe, and I love the functionality that all these new gadgets bring to our life. Still, I have to say, the design of these products is just bad, inhuman, in that their default notification sounds demand immediate attention. People have a real need for a less grating interface, one more at peace with human instincts.
It’s good that one can at least customize all these features. Cell phone ring tones are perhaps the best example I can think of: their popularity comes not so much from the music, which is such a crappy quality as to be worthless, but from the control people can exert over the process. Given the huge financial success of the ring tone industry, why in the world aren’t technology designers employing more psychologists and musicians and artists from the get-go, so that the default settings on these machines, which are the ones mostly used by most consumers, are more harmonious?
