A slight deviation from James to a different kind of wisdom. Practical advice.
When the folks at 37signals released a new email client in 2020, I jumped on it. I love HEY. An added bonus is a client for sending email newsletters. You can find mine here.
I’ve been involved with electronics most of my life. Gadgets. Tools. Ways to make things better. My involvement with automation taught me that not all automation (as in all technology) is beneficial. Sometimes we get way to smart for our own good.
37signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried recently wrote about a house he rented for his parents while they stayed in his town for a bit.
Not a good experience
My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.
It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.
Did they love all this state-of-the-art?
And it’s terrible. What a regression.
When you want light, you flip a switch. Easy.
The lights are powered by Control4. And require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse.
This one takes the prize for idiot-of-the-year.
The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it with an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse.
Setting the temperature? Should be easy.
Thermostats… Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait… What? Which number is this? Worse.
Compared to his experience on vacation:
It’s really the contrast that makes it alarming. We just got back from a vacation in Montana. Rented a house there. They did have a fancy TV — seems those can’t be avoided these days — but everything else was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-confirmed state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice. More traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human that’s modern.
If you are designing automated anything—consider these experiences. Make the thing human friendly.
Enter email address on the right and click follow to receive updates via email. I will never spam you. I’m not in that business! Thank you.
Faith Venture 
Leave a comment