Darwinian design - User Interface 97 conference discusses software and hardware evolution - Industry Trend or Event - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Dec, 1997 by Mathew Schwartz

I was surrounded: an MIT SAP R/3 integrator and Dublin graphic designer to my left, a Web server software maker and a woman tasked with making her Southern financial institution's Lotus Notes interface easy to use my right. A fictional user conference? No, lunch with attendees at User Interface 97, held in Boston in November.

Annually, the conference assembles a wide range of people with hands-on involvement in product development--people responsible for making applications usable. Many of the sessions touched upon real-world applications: Bruce Damer spoke on the new virtual retailing environment he created for Borders Books and Music. Thomas Hewett, a professor of psychology at Drexel University, used memory exercises to illustrate how the memory's "clustering effect" can be used to create retrieval cues for more intuitive interfaces.

Keynote Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering Inc. pursued a more theoretical path with his "Darwinian Design" talk, asking why some designs succeed--and others fail. The common notion is akin to Creationism: "If we build this, they will buy," he says. But software and hardware really go through four life-or-death evolutionary stages:

1. Raw Iron. The product is so new that nothing can touch it; users put up with a lot because there's only one supplier.

2. Checklist Battles. With competing products, checklists reign; the product with the most features wins, regardless of usability.

3. Productivity Wars. Functionality of multiple products is identical; ease of use wins.

4. Transparency. The point where the consumer has no idea who made the product. CD-ROM drives are in this stage.

This explains the success of products initially panned, which then achieve success in stage 3 through their ubiquity in suites, such as Microsoft Access. It also highlights failure, like that of WordPerfect, which dominated the word processor market until Microsoft Word beat it in stage 3.