Recently I’ve been studying the use of ethnography in large companies for product design and market strategy, which relates to some of the work I’ve done in usability and user experience.
In process of the research, I ran across an interesting anecdote about how the “big green button” on printers came out. I think it illustrates the value of video ethnography in product design, but, on an even more basic level, the value of simply watching how people live and work and use your product.
In a 1999 presentation for WPT Fest, Xerox PARC anthropologist Lucy Suchman described how she helped Xerox engineers understand how hard copiers were to use:
Around this time [1979] a project began at PARC to develop an intelligent, interactive expert system that would provide instructions to users in the operation of a particular photocopier, just put on the market and reported by its intended users to be “too complicated.” With Austin Henderson, I initiated a series of studies aimed first at understanding what made the existing machine difficult to use, and later at seeing just what happened when people engaged in “interactions” with my colleagues’ prototype expert advisor.
In order to explore these questions in detail we got a machine ourselves and installed it in our workplace. I then invited others of my co-workers, including some extremely eminent computer scientists, to try using the machine to copy their own papers for colleagues, with the understanding that a video camera would be rolling while they did so. This resulted among other things in what has become something of a cult video that I produced for John Seely Brown for a keynote address to CHI in 1983, titled “When User Hits Machine.” This image, taken from a 3/4″ reel-to-reel video recording made in 1982, shows two of my colleagues using the machine to make two-sided copies of a research paper. The CHI audience would recognize Allen Newell, one of the founding fathers of AI. His PARC colleague is a brilliant computational linguist named Ron Kaplan.
Video ethnographer Susan Faulkner of Intel relates one of the interesting results of Suchman’s video:
The film was shown to researchers and engineers at Xerox, and it led to significant changes in interface design, including the addition of the now ubiquitous large green button that allows users to quickly and easily make a copy.
AB — 2 June 2010
A Thinking Person, a.k.a. Cogit8R 
Thus are myths regarding product innovation born … the problem with the machine that I studied wasn’t with the ‘Start’ button – people located that easily. The problem was that when they pressed it either nothing happened, or something happened that seemed to bear no relationship to what they believed they had instructed the machine to do. The point of the study was that no matter what color the buttons, there’s no such thing as a self-explanatory machine. Whoever we are, however sophisticated, we need time to make unfamiliar devices our familiars. It’s fascinating to me how difficult to impossible it’s been to get this simple message (quite the opposite of the ‘green button as remedy’ message) to travel with the story!
Lucy Suchman
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