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Teapots, Application Design, And A Couple Of Our Recent Products

This note starts out about a million miles away from information technology, but it all comes out in the end, so stay with me on this, OK? It's about some basic principles of designing tools, and how those principles apply to teapots as well as to IT.

I work from home and often drink tea in the morning to get the engine started. A couple of years ago, I became fond of YiXing teapots. They're made from purple clay found only in a small region of China. They're good-looking creations, cunningly decorated.

They make a good pot of tea. They don't have to be washed--you just rinse them out with hot water and make a fresh pot. And they've got intriguing history and lore behind them; the making of them dates back about 1,000 years.

I recently bought a new YiXing teapot, one of the less-common, larger pots with a capacity of 24 ounces.

I commented on my purchase on an online community, and a friend posted a link to this essay by design guru Don Norman. Norman, like me, is a tea drinker, and he opens with photographs and descriptions of three teapots in his collection. These consisted of an "impossible teapot" made as a joke by a designer, with the handle and spout on the same side; the transparent "Nanna teapot" by designer Michael Graves, which Norman describes as "so charming I couldn't resist it"; and the Ronnenfeldt tilting teapot, which has a built-in shelf on which you lay the tea leaves. You lie the teapot on its side to brew the tea and, when you're done, stand it up so that the shelf--and the tea leaves--are out of the water, and the tea stops brewing and doesn't become bitter.

Norman writes:

Which one of these teapots do I usually use? None of the above. I drink tea every morning. At an early hour, efficiency comes first. So, upon awakening, I pad into my kitchen and push the button on a Japanese hot pot to boil water while I spoon cut tea leaves into a little metal brewing ball. I drop the ball into my cup, fill it with boiling water, wait a few minutes for it to steep, and my tea is ready to drink. Fast, efficient, easy to clean....

I value my teapots not only for their function of brewing tea, but because they are sculptural artwork. I love standing in front of the window, comparing the contrasting shapes, watching the play of light on the varied surfaces. When I'm entertaining guests or have time to spare, I brew my tea in the Nanna teapot for its charm or in the tilting pot for its cleverness. Design is important to me, but which design I choose depends on the occasion, the context, and above all, my mood....

Several years ago, I was taking part in a radio show along with designer Michael Graves. I had just criticized one of Graves’ creations, the "Rooster" teapot, as being pretty to look at, but difficult to use -- to pour the water was to risk a scalding -- when a listener called in. The caller owned the Rooster. "I love my teapot," he said. "When I wake up in the morning and stumble across the kitchen to make my cup of tea, it always makes me smile." His message seemed to be: "So what if it's a little difficult to use? Just be careful. It's so pretty it makes me smile, and first thing in the morning, that's most important."

Norman isn't just talking about teapots here. He's talking about all tools. And that's why this note isn't just about tea, but also about information technology--because you, our readers, are IT managers, and IT managers are tool-builders. You build tools for end users inside the company, for partners, and--especially in the case of online retail applications--for customers.

The tools that IT builds are, unfortunately, sometimes frustrating to use, and that's wrong. Workers are more productive when tools are enjoyable and easy to use. They'll look for excuses to avoid using tools that are difficult to use and frustrating. And forget about deploying customer-facing tools that are frustrating to use--customers will simply avoid using those tools, even if it means going to the competition.

For almost a year now, I've been involved in building a tool for our customers. The tool, MyInformationWeek, delivers a customized, personalized view of InformationWeek articles for each unique visitor. It learns from the preferences you tell it, and it also lets you rate stories on the fly and learns from the ratings you give each article. The goal is to deliver articles you want to read, and not stuff you're not interested in.

We deployed MyInformationWeek more than a month ago, and since then it's been an education in how real-world use collides with design expectations. I'm pleased to report that mostly we got it right--mostly it seems to work pretty well--but we've been hearing from users about problems registering and problems finding their way back once they'd initially registered. Readers told us that they wanted to be reminded, in e-mail, RSS feeds, or both, when MyIW has new content available that's of interest to them.

We're enjoying working on revising the site so that it's both useful and enjoyable for you to use. New users should go here first to find out about it and sign up, while returning users who already have accounts can go for return visits here.

And now back to the Norman essay: I find it ironic that the Norman essay, extolling efficient and emotionally satisfying design, is posted to the Internet as a PDF. PDFs are frustrating to read on the Internet. They take a while to load, and navigating through them and selecting text to cut and paste is radically different from how Web browsers usually behave--indeed, no other application in the world acts like a PDF viewer, which makes them frustrating to use. Design usability guru Jakob Nielsen criticizes PDFs in an essay entitled "PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption." He says PDFs are great for one thing and one thing only, which is to print documents out for offline reading. InformationWeek offers PDF downloads of our best articles for enterprise IT managers in our InformationWeek Download site, and I expect that's exactly how IW Download users are consuming the articles: printing them out for offline reading and distribution to colleagues.

Further irony: PDF critic Nielsen is Norman's partner in the Nielsen-Norman Group.

Take a look at MyIW and IW Download and let us know what you think. If you don't find them useful--and enjoyable to use--we want to know about it. Also, please let us know about some examples of computer hardware and software that are both useful and delightful to use. Conversely, are there popular applications and hardware that you find frustrating to use?

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