Latest Term for User-friendly

On the manufacturing automation - machine control side their are many words for 'user friendly', like 'idiot proof', etc. But on manufacturing software side oh things, it is sad, because 'user friendly' is a last consideration. That is why when manufacturing buys a software like CMMS, they have to also hire a consultant to teach them how to use and profit from the software. (Instead of the software being user friend and guiding the end_user the way the consultant is.) What's even more sad, manufacturing pays astronomical mark up prices for their software and it is'nt even as user friendly as MS Acces software for $149,.

Any answer please ?

How about "clear" or perhaps "simple"? Maybe "straightforward"?

Spell checker recognized all of the choices above...

I think I had not elaborate my point:

I am almost out of touch practically from my profession (Electronic Technology- Field Power Electronics, Biomedical Equipment Services ++ ) since 2000 and only interest is discussions.

In early 2000s the technology had been confirmed and the term was in broad use.

Lot of literature was published on manufacturing on the lines.

The other phrases (Not terms) were and still being used like: Fool-proof and Userfriendly and like that.

I sometime came across a quote by un-known:

"You can make fool-proof but not bloody-fool-proof."

But all those are just funny or on-the-spot talks.

Not a Term.

Hope some people may be active in production or procurement / supply and may get it in brochures.

Hope it adds to my question.

Thank to all who have posted reply to my question.

Around 2000, I would get interview requests because "human factors" appeared on my resume. Many of the job descriptions involved doing "usability" studies. Maybe one or the other of those words is what you had in mind?

"Simple"

"uncomplicated"

As much as I hate to be the bearer of Bad News, I feel compelled to inform you that your search for a single-word term meaning 'user-friendly' is doomed from the outset.

Why is it? Consider the massive effort put forth worldwide by marketers and advertisers for ever more verbosity and obfuscation in the description of everyday things. Take the lowly toothpick, for example.

In 1968 you could go to your local grocer, ask for and purchase a box of toothpicks. Yes, toothpicks. That's what they were called back then. Not so today.

Before buying anything, you must first consult an online thesaurus. Mine is in the shop, and so I'll give you the best I've got: 'individual interdental stimulator'. From two to thirteen syllables spanning three words in just a mere blink of an eye.

I'd give you the new term for that also, but I don't know it yet. Not completely, anyway. All I can tell you is that one of the words features the prefix 'nano.'

Very popular these days, nano. Maybe you should start looking there.

Nice of you !

That's the spirit! Of course any single-word descriptor will be intrinsically inadequate. That's why InterCaps were invented. To wit:

NanoIntuitive - Human-Machine-Interfaces (HMIs) which may possibly have some marginally redeeming features but, really, just ask anyone and they'll tell you:

"Totally User-Hostile" We all know examples, but for those few fortunate individuals who have yet to experience the joys set before us....

TV Remotes - Try this simple experiment: Close your eyes, name each button and tell me what it does. Go on! Try it!

You can't, can you? Don't worry, nobody else can either - including the designers! The interfaces are so nanoIntuitive that here in the States, designing something with that many buttons is now considered a felony. Bet you didn't know that.

Microwave Ovens - Another perfect example of HMI gone amuck. Think "Button Cancer." Buttons reproducing uncontrollably. You know it, I know it and so does the Missus know it. In fact, that's how we menfolk know it: countless otherwise healthy marriages down the tubes because of one careless HMI designer. A travesty, really.

You get the picture. What you want is the term

NanoCounterIntuitive

One word.

You asked.

We delivered.

Apple suggested the one-button mouse interface (no keyboard) back in 1994

And look at 'em today: the iPad - one button, no mouse and no keyboard. If they keep this up much longer, we'll all be paying a whole lotta money for nothin'! :-))

And in Windows No Start-button and no Menu-Bar trend or Bars are barred in window / browsers ... I think some DOS man is in action. and for us the oldies it is being DOS bluescreens.

Disney-On-Silicon? Nah, CP/M was definitely the way to go.

Ahh - CP/M. Good. User-friendly. Where did it go?

It went the 'Gary Kildall wants $500/copy for CP/M as the IBM PC's O/S!? You gotta be kidding!!' route.

B. Gates, meanwhile, charged $90/copy for DOS and the rest is Hysterical.

Yes ! and I think still as in 1994. Have they change to Non-Mouse culture? I am not a mac user.

Thanks very much! I really mean it.

You're welcome! (used to know how to say that in Urdu, but I haven't seen Ayesha & Faisal in ages :(...

My nearly 30 yo microwave has two buttons: "Door Open" and "Start". Above these are two Dials - one is a timer, with 30 min max and the other a 5 setting heating control.

I think even europium could operate this...

Of course I can! I'm the one who sold it to you. Remember? Heck, it was 20 years old when I bought it from the junkman.

Amana RadarRange

Who are you kidding? The RadarRange was a prop for the movie Airplane.

(Pardon the play on words)

And, don't call me Shirley.

(JoAnn? Is that you?)

How's she working out, btw?

The microwave, I mean.

Mine has one less button. It has "Heat Setting" - dial, Min to Max, "Door Open" - button, and "Time" - run-back dial, also functioning as On/Off control. Intuitive. And user-friendly.

"...also functioning as On/Off control."

It's when they start layering functionality like that, that things get really complicated. Wish they'd just leave well-enough alone!

Mine got so confusing I finally had to pry the one knob off.

But this isn't a complication. When the timer runs back to 0, the bell goes 'ding' and the micros stop waving. So to turn off, just turn the dial back to 0. 'Ding'. Off. Easy-peasy.

Oh yeah - it also turns off when the 'open door' button is pressed, which is nice. This provides a 'pause' function, allowing inspection or intervention for e.g. stirring during the cooking process without unintentionally cooking ones hand.

The timer stops while the door is open and the bell doesn't go 'ding', so users don't dribble prematurely. Normal service resumes when the door is re-closed.

Which just goes to show you that the world NEEDS engineers no matter WHAT my ex thinks (that she does at all was a recent revel ...never mind). You know, some folks just have The Knack and it sure looks ta me like you do. Me? Heck, its all just one big head-spinnin' blur of nonstop innovation and technolijical porgress. Damned if I can keep up! Speaking of which, did you know that you can pull the door off those thingies, defeat that annoying safety switch you mentioned, strap the thingie face-down to a hand-truck and use it to fry fire-ant nests in-situ? Bakes them buggers' brains right outta their little noggins in no time flat - and without chemicals, too!! :-)

Some day Google will invent a microwave with one button... "Start". Why do i say google? Because it will use Google's Goggles technology to see what was put in, classify it, calculate size, remember your preferences, and cook/heat with one push of a button. If Google is designing their own car, no too far a stretch to see them designing other physical devices like a microwave. My kids might see Google as the next GE making all kinds of user-friendly stuff.

I doubt it.

I don't think they would risk the design patent infringement case Apple would bring.

One button everything is definitely Apple-esque, and seeing as how they have patents for things as broad a vague as 'all electronics in a rectangular shape with a screen that covers most of one side' (paraphrasing there)...I bet they also have claimed rights to 'one button'.

Check this out.

So they call it "Uni-butting" and get around it. As the beer brewers got around Raymond J Johnson Jr.'s spew for selling Lite Beer by brewing Light Beer. Plus that could be used SOOoooo many different ways.

...yeah. I noticed how well that worked when Samsung tried to get around making something competitive with an I-phone but calling it a 'Galaxy'.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia here

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object.

Must the object be human-made to be usable? Like, I used to use my ex's little shitzu to wipe my boots after shovelin' out Derby's stall. Easy as pie, and friendly, too. Didn't seemed to mind one bit and always glad to hop up in her lap & snuggle afterwards. 'Human-made' seems arbitrarily restrictive if you ask me.

The shitzu was not originally intended for cleaning your boots that is an improvised use of something meant for another purpose. This is a credit to you for seeing multiple uses for something that many would consider limited in it's usefulness lol

I dunno, Phydeaux was always in such good humour that it seemed wasteful to consider him as just guncotton. :-)

You seem to be suggesting that a Shitzu is something other than 'human-made'...

.

Here is the raw material as it likely looked before human modification:

Here is the finished product after human modification:

To me a Shitzu is definitely 'human-made'.

...and not very User-Friendly, either, for all their efforts. Annunciators, alarm systems being the obvious exceptions.

Other Uses:

• Great for stopping those annoying winter draughts. Simply roll five units up in a large towel and wedge against base of exterior doors.
• For cleaning your rifle after a satisfying day out at the deer lease. Used in conjunction with a thin rod and a dab of gun oil, the pad's self-oscillations do a much more thorough job at removing stubborn residues than passive methods. You know the barrel is clean when the pad begins to actively squeak.
• Greyhound training. Mechanical rabbits are just Soooo Yesterday, like.
• Stopper for the kitchen sink when you can't find the regular one. Reusable so long as you don't fill the sink too high. If you forget and leave the water running, no worries; there's always Craigslist.
• Cleaning paint brushes.
• Dabbing-up spills.
• Adjusting your boots' instep. I have very high arches, but custom-made boots are out of the question. Solution? Phydeaux-Brand® Moldable Insteps.
• Keeping birds and squirrels from building nests in large rooftop drain vents.
• Likewise for chimneys in summertime.
• A Thousand-and-One other uses around the home and shop!

Well, time to go feed the craken...

"Heeere Swiffey Swiffey Swiffey..."

easy...... over thirty years teaching computer use, CAD, CAE and CAM the only word to suffice was..... easy. And to date I have found no intuitive (good word though), clear or easy computer CAD/CAM/CAE system. The word is just plain easy.

This is a term unfamiliar to my new "smart" phone.

Hostile comes to mind for it.

To Haajee, Lyn and everyone:

The digital age, unleashed open, a kind of Pandora-box, in which the actual became virtual, and instead of a user-interface containing a very few physical knobs and levers, we now have a multi-layered control-systems with hundreds if not thousands, of control posts facilitators and actuators - all written (in code) instead of being actually built, often in functional clash with each other.

This is mainly due to the ease of designing control-functions, testing them and integrating them "On Paper" rather than actually and physically building them to function properly.

Even the physical is designed and tested on virtual platforms, then auto-built robotically (Via CAD-CAM or CAE). The freedom to Hog-Wild a design, free of physical restraints, gave way to exaggerated level of complexity - sometimes completely unusable, or unpractical for any user whatsoever.

The comparison between a modern analogue and digital camera designs is a good example to demonstrate this: The digital version has a few hundred control functions, instead of the old analogue camera which had only six: Focus, Aperture, Shutter, film advance lever, film-compartment release, and shutter.

Yet, both camera designs function rather the same, although not by the same means of transcription medium.

The same be applied to phones, lyn.

Next time some joker tries to sell you a 'smart' phone, ask 'em "As compared to what?"

Meanwhile, did you know old Moto VT-220s make great doorstops? They do! And paperweights - just like that counter girl down at FedEx/Kinkos on Burnet Rd. (sigh)

I would like to hear from one of the product designers who is responsible for TV remotes, microwave ovens, after market car radios, or the myriad of other products that fail fall into this category. It would be interesting to see what possesed them to create these products.

I remember a major communications company producing a "feature packed" radio in the late '90's. It took several hours of deprogramming to make it usable. Even then it required several revisions and recalls before it was as reliable as the unit it replaced.

I would guess that BMW is the overall winner for designing a car that requires a CD Rom for an owners manual and a special key for valet parking

This could become one of those threads that take on a life of their own, similar to "can we all agree on.............."

"can we all agree on.............."

I can tell you what Marketing all agree on: the erroneous conviction that More is Better.

Ain't so.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough: The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin.

This book should be Required Reading for anyone designing human-machine interfaces or who is responsible for overseeing the design thereof. This doesn't mean just app developers and so forth, but anyone designing anything which will be used by someone else.

The following is not directed at you, Hajee, but to those whose designs are best left unexpressed - the current crop of TV-remote designers come to mind, and not a few mobile-app designers as well (the list being quite lengthy, actually, and well beyond the scope of this thread).

[rant]

Making something more complicated is just about one of the easiest things imaginble - and the hallmark of the lazy or misinformed or misdirected or just plain idiotic designer. You can always add more buttons, more features more, more, more, all the while enslaving your users to the peculiar, bizarre or even maddening pretzel 'logic' behind your designs, however unwitting on your part.

In other words, good designs take time and a great deal of forethought. More than anything else, they require you to be empathic: the placing of yourself completely in your user's shoes, using your design given what your user knows and understands, the demands on your user's time, patience and any other factors which your users will bring to the party. If you can't do that, then please, by all means, do something else for a living because you'll just end up making a whole lot of folks' experiences with your product downright miserable.

Making something simpler, more elegant, more useful, more humane, on the other hand, is a talent few possess. The best interfaces are the ones no-one notice as being such. They integrate so seamlessly into the users' experience that they go altogether unnoticed, invisible, part of the background because they facilitate rather than obstruct. A well-designed user interface is a joy to use; a poorly-designed one? Hell on Earth. One thing the world does NOT need more of, and that's more crap. Pick up any TV remote and you know exactly what I mean.

[/rant]

You wanted a word, Hajee?

Humane

In your native tongue?

مہربان، نرم دل

Not that it's any of my business, but I went to check in Goggle-Translate (which I'm sure we all can), translated it back and forth, in English, Urdu and Hebrew (for a good measure of cross-reference, and yes, it's an old translators trick) and what Google said was:

مہربان، نرم دل in English is "Kind", or "Gracious" (which is fine for the mentioned purpose), but nevertheless, "Humane" to Urdu is انسانی, but keep in mind that in Hebrew, "Human" and "Humane", is the same word, אנושי

No, I'm not speaking Urdu, and besides, Pakistan has a few more languages, other than Urdu.

That's what GT told me too, but I figured 'human' was a bit heavy on the generic side and so consulted three others, all of which favored that alternative translation. Whilst certainly inexact (not that 'human' is any closer; ie, "I'm only human" implies 'flawed and imperfect by virtue of being ~', for example, among fifteen gozillion other interpretations, given the complete absence of any other qualifiers...), it's certainly in the neighborhood. Having said that, it would just be my dumb luck that Haajee is REALLY a Frenchman sipping absinthe and kicking Angry Bird arse on his brand new iPad Retina 64GB over on Vermin's thread, whilst that other bloke is looking at porn. C'mon, they're French for Jacques' sake! How much you wanna bet? :-)))

I would love to be French, but it's they who wouldn't want me to be French, and I cannot blame them - I would make a lousy French, as motch as I wood Luv to

Oh? Do tell! :-)

Ze Franch are wonderfool pipul. Ze Kulture is exquisite.

Who wouldn't wont to be Franch ?

My problom izat I only know how to speek Onglish wizi Franch accident, boot not propaar Franch.

No problem. Just wear sunglasses and tell 'em you're a location scout for the sequel...

Oh ! Thaksssssssss

Whatever the answer, do tread carefully past the deposits of bovine excrescence in the above...

One word: wellies

Since the advent of "plug n play" it is assumed that from that point on everything is easy. "User friendly" ends at the point that the item is set up. The user interface is generally not easy. Just check your phone. I used to just dail on a number pad to make a call, now I must open the screen for the number pad. GUIs tend to be thick and sticky as the name suggests.

And we simply, almost fatalistically, accept this; our complacency virtually guaranteeing More of the Same. Had we historically voted with our wallets on the actual technical and ergonomic *merits* of these products instead, I guarantee you the word 'windows' would still refer to something through which we look, rather than something at which we glare.