Title: Will Ford learn that software isn’t manufactured?
Context: Smart cars are being designed by people who don???t understand smart systems.
Synopsis: Henry Ford apocryphally said that if he asked his customers what they wanted he would have made them a faster horse. Well, these days it seems his eponymously named company is struggling to understand how to interpret their customers??? desire for a smarter car. The bald faced problem is that while they are manufacturing wizards, software and smart interfaces are not developed within comparable processes. Engineers, indeed gifted at what they do, often miss the subtlety of user-centric software design, instead creating elaborate process ??? perhaps technically elegant ??? that are often complex in their usability (have you ever tried to read an automobile???s owner???s manual?) This is not the paradigm that people have come to expect from their computer interfaces, or at least these are not the types of things they are willing to spend their money on. The last thing that someone in the midst of driving wants to deal with is a command and control UI designed by people who solve problems through the use of switches, knobs and dials. The only way they are going to get past this is to alter the tried, true, proven and safe methods that they have used for nigh on a century to build their product and embrace simplification, collaboration and an overall holistic design methodology.
Best Bit: ???Companies who can master the challenge of software???s unique nature, and particularly of how humans interact with it, will thrive.???