Simple questions with complex answers

Several years ago, I began my UX design workshops with a clip from the movie City Slickers. In the scene, Billy Crystal tries to explain to Daniel Stern how to operate his VCR. It was hilarious back in the 1990s when everyone could relate to Stern’s frustration and confusion, but not so much today when everyone has forgotten (or never experienced) what it was like to use a VCR.

If you’re feeling nostalgic and want to see the clip, you can find it here:

The scene ends with Stern asking, “How do you do the clock?”

This is a simple question. But too often, even after decades of attention to paid to user experience mindsets and methodologies, simple questions have complex answers.

This is particularly relevant this month (March) when most states in the U.S. switch to Daylight Saving Time, requiring people to set their clocks forward one hour.

After hundreds of years of clock evolution, the procedure for setting the time on a digital clock has only recently been simplified or automated. It was only 25 years ago when you needed to change the time on the clock radio in your Chrysler minivan, you were confronted with a confounding user interface:

Quick! At a glance, how do you set the time? You might think SET will get you there, but that’s not the first step. Here’s what Chrysler required you to do:

1. Insert the key in the ignition and turn it to the “Accessories” setting.

2. Turn on the radio.

3. Press the SET button.

4. Press the SEL button once.

5. Press the TUNE button up or down to change the hour.

6. Press the SEL button once again.

7. Press the TUNE button up or down to change the minute.

8. Wait for the display to return to the radio settings.

(Actually, there’s a step 0: Find the Owner’s Manual and look up “Clock” in the Index.)

Makes perfect sense, right? An easy procedure to remember when the last time you changed the time was six months ago! Yet for the Chrysler product team, “tuning” your clock was a perfectly reasonable solution.

As UX professionals, product managers, and development engineers, we must train ourselves to recognize when our products deliver complex answers to simple user questions. We must then invest the extra effort to design a better solution.