When your smartphone tries to be too smart

Tim Harford

Back in the 1980s, the design expert Donald Norman was chatting to a colleague when his office phone rang. He finished his sentence before reaching for the phone, but that delay was a mistake. The phone stopped ringing and, instead, his secretary’s phone started ringing on a desk nearby. The call had been automatically re-routed. Alas, it was 6pm, and the secretary had gone home. Norman hurried over to pick up the second phone, only to find it stopped too.

“Ah, it’s being transferred to another phone,” he thought. Indeed, a third phone in the office across the hall started to sound. As he stepped over, the phone went silent. A fourth phone down the hall started ringing. Was the call doomed to stagger between phones like a drunkard between lampposts? Or had a completely different call coincidentally come in?

Norman tells the story in The Design of Everyday Things, the opening chapter of which is a collection of psychopathic objects from bewildering telephone systems to rows of glass doors in building lobbies that simply offer no clue whether to push or pull or even where the hinges are.

“Pretty doors,” jokes Norman. “Elegant. Probably won a design award.”

Reading Norman’s book more than three decades after its publication in 1988, it is striking how much the surface of things has changed. We no longer have to deal with incomprehensible telephone systems or VHS recorders. Good design is not a niche luxury now, but viewed as an essential part of business. The world has scrambled to imitate the success of Apple, one of the world’s most valuable and admired companies, which is built on good design: beautiful, easy-to-use products.

And yet I wonder. The aviation safety expert Earl Wiener is famous for “Wiener’s Laws”, which include “whenever you solve a problem you usually create one”. The truth is that modern devices may seem simple and easy to use, whereas they are in fact fantastically complicated. Those complications are elegantly obscured until something goes wrong.

I thought of Wiener and Norman recently as I arrived in Amsterdam, equipped with a Eurostar ticket barcode on my phone. Problem: the Eurostar exit barrier in Amsterdam is also the ticket gate for a variety of metropolitan rail services. As I tried to scan the barcode, the ticket barrier perceived my phone as a wannabe contactless credit card, and charged

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