TechPulse 360

ITunes' Genus sidebar mixes complexity and intuition

Ease of use is the current buzz phrase in technology. Make things simple and more people will buy them.

But complexity has an important role to play – and it isn’t going away. So maybe we should get used to it.

A recent conversation with Paul Saffo made me think again about the need for complexity in computing devices. But complexity needs to be married with intuitive.

Convenient, simple, easily grasped user interfaces are the holy grail of consumer (and increasingly business) technology.  Look at the iPhone, or Apple’s Genius Sidebar. The Blackberry does a pretty good job. Google has made strides with its online documents. What about the improvement in relatively simple tasks, such as downloading updates for the Mozilla browser?

But are we losing something in the trade off?

Saffo, the futurist and Silicon Valley technology forecaster, says complexity allows us to do more with computing systems.

“We should not be afraid of complex, high-performance tools,” he says. They aren’t going away and will require a greater investment in user time and sophistication.

Clearly in the recent years, people have become more comfortable with computers and capable with keyboards and mice. But technology companies need to become better at marrying the intuitive and complex if we are to take the next step.

And that next step is vitally important with the U.S. in a “global brain race” with the rest of the world, says Saffo. With countries such as China and India graduating scores more engineers than the U.S., and even if these new graduates aren’t as well educated, America is in real trouble, says Saffo.

“The U.S. is unilaterally disarming,” he says. “We are falling behind.”