There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever.
Those ten people are those who sign off on the Settings menus on desktops, mobile and consumer at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony. The decision would be to create a standard that says three things: what are the user adjustable features common to every device with a screen, what single place are they to go in the Settings menu and where, and what common data structure could store them.
This single action would save everyone worldwide time and solve so much error when setting up a new device or using a shared or public system. That alone should be enough reason. For those who have trouble here, it would instantly fix the Catch-22 of needing to change UI settings before being able to use something, but the settings are locked behind an unusable UI.
For app developers and website designers, the presence of that standard data structure on a system means their products can instantly know how to be most usable to each individual, without reinventing any wheels or complicating their own UI. Preferred text size and style, icon size and spacing, good and bad color combinations, language – if a machine could pick that up from your phone through Bluetooth, a USB key, a web service, you name it, then it is instantly and optimally ready for you. The more precise your needs, the better that is.
There are many other benefits, and we’ll get to them. For now, though, imagine how life would be different – and in a bad way – if cars didn’t have a standard control layout. Most genres of consumer electronics went through early years of experimentation before settling on common codes of controls that meant people could get new purchases to work quickly before exploring whatever was new.
You can see this in nature as carcinization, where many different groups of sea creatures have evolved to look like crabs. If it looks like a crab, moves like a crab, and nips like a crab, it’s probably not a crab. Crabness is such a superior way of living that kind of life that many crustaceans end up there. It’s the same in tech, where the clamshell laptop and Kubrickian monolithic mobile device are the same across brands and platforms, both when turned off and when up and running. At the point where you most want or need convergent evolution to work, to let you efficiently use a new, guest, or misconfigured machine, it doesn’t.
Some of this is historical, baggage from the days when IT hadn’t converged. Some are the result of an itch to differentiate, to keep your users on your platform by making it a royal pain to move. Some is that accessibility is IT’s neglected child, costing time and money and complexity. You’d much rather spend those on features you can sell, or because you can only just afford the core product. That’s not true for the big names, for whom the decision to unify basic UI parameter control would, if anything, simplify the design and testing process. It hasn’t happened because nobody can be bothered.
Which is a shame. A standard would lead to libraries, tools, testing protocols, and automation in general that would ease the process of more human-compatible UI design. There’d be no limits placed on innovation or useful differentiation, the arguments Apple made while it resisted European demands for USB-C. Any standard would be extensible, and anything that used it would be free to respect that as much or as little as appropriate.
For users, there’ll be utilities to fine-tune all the aspects of screen interaction, just once, and have that work forever everywhere. Think of it as getting a prescription from an optician, only with more schema and JSON. It’s also a chance to tell the digital world not to do things that just don’t work for you. Imagine not being able to see white text on a bright blue background, then look at how many times that’s used on buttons and menus and buttons on phones and online. Some don’t have to imagine that. Not convenience, necessity, but no chance that every designer will accommodate you. If we had a standard “avoid/substitute” mechanism, they wouldn’t have to.
In any case, our lives are filled with ridiculously capable, insanely flexible technology that should be working as we like it, not locked behind some poor excuse for an adventure game puzzle.
Absent the opportunity to lock the ten team leaders who could make it happen into a room and deny them beer and crayons until they come to an agreement, a cleverer strategy is needed. There’s a whole pile of legislation out there around the world setting equality of access for disabilities. It isn’t used much. It should be used more: better accessibility for one is better accessibility for all.
It’d be one small step to a more civilized world, and boy, we’re owed one right now. ®