Automatic solutions sound so wonderful.
Everything just magically gets done. And machines do it all on their own. They give us what we need, when we need it, and how we need it. The computer becomes a mind reader for our preferences. Science fiction becomes reality.
Robot vacuums. Autopilot. Self-driving cars. Back to the Future power laces.
A lot of NoUI thinking lends itself to making these kinds of automatic solutions. They aim to feel like pure delight. Like magic. Where technology should be in the twenty-first century.
But when it comes to actually implementing an automatic solution, a lot of people get scared. Some designers shiver. Some engineers run far, far away. Some project managers laugh when I draw one on the whiteboard. Some executives tell me I’m nuts. They assume it’s impossible. Some even tell me to leave the meeting room.
And you know what?
They should be scared. Because automatic solutions—even partially automatic—are really hard to do correctly.
You need a lot of valid data to prove intention. You need a lot of confidence in your data analysis to know when to take an action. The wrong information, or using the wrong lens to look at that information, can lead to a bad reading and a terrible result. Even if the stakes are low, an undesired result that’s off the mark might be so creepy that it alienates customers and invalidates their belief in your product.
But when we overcome the immense barriers, when we have a rich understanding of the environment, and apply models that work beyond ideal situations, we can create something special. Something people love. Because when automatic solutions work well, they have a history of doing very well in the marketplace. Some of them have become an invisible yet embedded part of our lives.
The mathematician Heron of Alexandria, born in roughly 10 AD, wrote books about his visions for the grand machines of the future. Surprisingly, they weren’t filled with wireframes for apps, but inventions that could help humankind become more efficient by utilizing air, water, and steam pressure. Among his inventions, he drew a steam engine nearly fifteen hundred years before one was realized, and two designs for an automatic solution that wouldn’t become a real product until 1960.1
In that year—nearly two millennia later—brothers Lee Hewitt and Dee Horton released a working version of one of Heron’s dreams: an automated door. Frustrated by the effects of high winds on swing doors at their store in Corpus Christi, the brothers started their own door company that sold the world’s first automatically opening doors.2
Today, the Horton Automatic sliding doors are replicated all over the world. When you walk up to a grocery store or hospital, the doors often automatically open. When health-care workers rush a patient into a hospital from an ambulance, the doors just slide open.
Um, I know how automatic doors work.
The experience isn’t a shocking, please-leave-the-meeting-room, techno-utopian vision, but an expected, boring solution. It isn’t something we marvel at, revere, or even consider special; it’s become an automatic solution we just count on. And that, honestly, is a great thing.
These seamless, automatic solutions sometimes take decades (or a few millennia) before they are reliable enough to become part of our everyday lives. They’re not easy, but they’re remarkable when they work. They set a high bar for technological success.
In 1953, not long after getting into a car accident with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, John W. Hetrick filed US patent 2,649,311 for what is considered the prototype for the first car air bag. German Walter Linderer filed a patent for a similar system a year later. In 1967, Mercedes-Benz started working on air bags for their cars, and a handful of other car manufacturers made incremental improvements in the years following.
But it wouldn’t really be until Allen K. Breed’s air bags were tied to a crash-sensing system—US patent 5,071,161—that the solution became standardized. By 1998, the automatically deploying air bag was so reliable that it became federal law in the United States that all consumer cars and light trucks sold had to have driver and passenger safety air bags.3
An automatic solution that puts a soft barrier between me and my steel-framed car? Obviously, a great thing. So convincing, it’s the law. It’s estimated that air bags have saved more than 10,000 lives4 by acting in a millisecond of time in which you’re not able to wake up your phone, swipe, and tap an app to launch an inflatable bag between you and your car.
Driving is one of the most dangerous things we do on an everyday basis. And cars are also the location of another embedded automatic solution that is one of the most insane, risky ideas that we don’t even bat an eye toward today: automatic transmission.
“Did you ever realize how many steps it takes to drive a car with a conventional transmission? Watch closely . . . after 19 distinct manual operations, she’s finally under way.”
That beginning of an ad for Oldsmobile’s 1940 “Hydra-Matic”—the first automatic transmission—sounds like the beginning of this book. Advertised as “simplicity itself,” the commercial for the automatic solution they called “Motoring’s Magic Carpet” showed how manual controls—like the clutch—have become unnecessary.5 “This is said by engineers,” the New York Times wrote in 1939, “to be the most revolutionary development in motor cars since the invention of the self-starter.”6
By 2013, fewer than four percent of new cars sold in the United States had manual transmission.7 Even Lamborghini, a car lover’s car, has started making models with automatic transmissions.8
The market loves great automatic solutions.
They’re not easy. They may even take a decade or two to perfect. You may even get thrown out of a conference room suggesting the notion. But don’t underestimate their power: Automatic solutions that work well can become a seamless part of our lives.