The Skill of Thinking Like an Idiot

Designers and engineers are not average users. It is crucial that we don't design for ourselves but for those significantly less intelligent and we need to stop seeing that as insulting to our customers

We design by default for a range of physical attributes from the 5th to the 95th percentile and within our teams we will usually find a reasonably representative range of body shapes and strengths so it becomes automatic to consider them all. But your development team probably doesn't have anyone of 5th percentile intelligence. I am going to hazard that none of you reading this are of low intelligence. But plenty of the users of your products are. How capable are you really of thinking like they do?

Common sense is not as common as its name would suggest

Unfortunately, common sense is not as common as its name would suggest. As designers our role is often to advocate for the people who lack it. To put it bluntly, we should be constantly trying to empathise with the stupid. We should be looking at the product and its user interfaces through the eyes of people who can't be expected to understand how it works and what they should and shouldn't do with it. Everything should be intuitive and fail-safe. The famous and oft-quoted "Murphy's Law" is actually a genuine design principle. "If something can go wrong, it will" is not a pessimist's lament, it was coined by an American Aerospace Engineer, Edward Murphy, and was intended to ensure that no possibility of failure was left without a mitigation, to always consider the worst case scenario and not merely to hope that it never happens, because one day, with absolute certainty, it will.

We should be constantly trying to empathise with the stupid

When you work with intelligent people it is often harder than you'd imagine for them to contemplate how regular people will use the products that we develop. So often an engineer will approach a device and think that just because they know how to use it, it is intuitive and simple to operate. They can find it very difficult to understand that they are not an average user, and certainly are not a sub-average one. I can find myself with 4 or 5 engineers trying to convince me that their solution is acceptable because none of them have any problem understanding how to use it, while I am advocating for the idiot who will turn the handle the wrong way or perform some operation that all of us know will break it but which a non-technically minded operator could feasibly attempt. "They'll make the mistake once and then they will know", I am told. This is not an acceptable solution to a design problem. A user interface should silently communicate how to use it to the operator, and ideally it should do this without resorting to graphics and written instructions.

The very first Apple iMac, the rounded translucent one that came out in 1998, was aimed at first time internet users. It entered a world where home PCs were still scary inscrutable machines for geeks, and the internet was something that at most you'd used a bit at school or university. When you opened the box, the first thing that you saw laid into the styrofoam packaging was the instruction book. It looked like it was going to be a thick book but when you took it out it surprised by being merely a single folded sheet of A4. Removed it revealed the handle of the iMac that you could use to pull the computer out of the large box. Page one of the instructions had just one large image of the back of the iMac with its power cable and said simply "plug it in". Page two showed the front and the USB keyboard and mouse and the only instructions were to plug those in and press the power button. You then turned the booklet to the back page and a message to "enjoy. If you need any more help go to www.apple.com/imac". Bear in mind that you weren't yet online and in all probability had no way of doing so. But of course after switching it on the iMac talked you through the first few stages of getting you online and it even came with a free month of dial-up service. These minimalist instructions were sending a clear message - don't be scared, this is easy. As I see it, if Steve Jobs could sell a computer to people who'd never used the internet before and not include any instructions then we sure as hell shouldn't need to write instructions on a door to explain to people how to open it.

If we need to do so much as add an arrow to a handle to explain which way to turn it then we have failed as designers

If we need to do so much as add an arrow to a handle to explain which way to turn it then we have failed as designers. These things have a language of their own; a well-designed interface tells the user how to operate it without resorting to printed arrows and words. This may seem obvious but there are some terrible examples out there of armoured vehicles with assisted door mechanisms controlled by an array of knobs, buttons, and levers. Opening or closing the door is like cracking a safe (or trying to operate the shower in an unfamiliar hotel...). On Plasan-designed vehicles there is always just a single intuitive handle. It is the task of our engineers to connect all of the systems together in a way that an obvious pull or turn of that handle will open the door - it shouldn't be the job of the user to be individually activating various valves, latches, and pistons like a crane operator. Our job as designers and engineers shouldn't be to show how clever we are because we can work a complicated system, it is to make that system simple enough for idiots to use.

Nobody chooses to lack intelligence

It isn't a pleasant characteristic to assume that other people are idiots, but as designers, this is often exactly what we must do. I remember at school a teacher giving a talk about this. He gave the example of the warning you get on shampoo bottles, "for external use only". Why is this necessary? Because somebody somewhere is going to be stupid enough to think that you clean your hair by drinking the shampoo. Assuming that your users are idiots is not arrogant. It is quite the opposite, it is considerate. What is arrogant is assuming that just because you know how to use something everyone else will manage too. What is arrogant is thinking that anyone who can't figure it out deserves to suffer. Nobody chooses to lack intelligence. Our job is to help them.

Nir Kahn is the Director of Design for?Plasan?and has been responsible for vehicle design in the company for 20 years, including the design of the Navistar MaxxPro MRAP, Oshkosh M-ATV and JLTV, the?Plasan SandCat and Yagu, and many others