Marty Cooper, inventor of the very first cell phone 40 years ago in April of 1973, sat down for a short interview as a part of PBS Digital Studio’s INVENTORS series. I found this part to be particularly interesting:

What’s important about any technology is that the technology is hopefully invisible, but at least transparent and maybe intuitive.

Think about it. The purpose of technology is to make your life better. Most cell phones don’t do that very well, in fact, they force us to become engineers, to learn a bunch of new things, and we shouldn’t have to do that.

The ideal phone would be one where I would just talk to the phone, or maybe the phone would read my mind, and it would do things to make my life better.

A couple of thoughts:

#1) That last bit, about the ideal phone being more of a mind-reading, human-like companion is definitely something the world is moving toward. Google Now and Siri are just the first steps toward being able to interact conversationally with our phones, and I think the mind/body-reading part will largely come from the impending flood of smartwatches and wearable devices coming later this year and next.

#2) The second bit about technology making life better for regular people, not just the knowledgeable engineers who build it, sounds very human factors-like to me.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 seems to be a good example of the engineer-first type of device that Marty describes. It’s definitely a technical powerhouse that “power users” will love (I’d definitely like to try it out sometime), but the sheer number of features it has all mishmashed together makes it a usability/learnability headache for the average Joe. Read The Verge’s review to get a feel for how many new capabilities Samsung added to the S4 – there’s quite a lot.

Here’s a screenshot from the S4′s quick settings tray that demonstrates this complexity pretty clearly. Can you make a good guess as to what the green “Sync” button is actually syncing? Tell me what the difference is between “Air view” and “Screen mirroring”. Do their icons demonstrate what they do clearly enough? Is there a downside to leaving “S beam” (the much-advertised sharing functionality) turned on? Is “Blocking mode” some kind of special lock, or maybe something like the iPhone’s “Do Not Disturb” setting? Don’t I want “Power saving” on all the time? What gets disabled in that mode? Does “Driving mode” open up my GPS app, or do something else entirely? Why do I need to remember to press that button when I go driving anyway?

Features for features’ sake does not an ideal phone make.

Some of the many new capabilities of the S4 are legitimately useful and industry-leading, but they’re implemented in ways that require outside knowledge of the way they work and how to use them (like the above example). When new features aren’t immediately obvious to people – like HDR photography, AirPlay or iCloud syncing – Apple very cleverly uses TV advertising to demonstrate how they’re used and how they improve your digital life. Samsung also did this effectively with their NFC-enabled S Beam functionality, but I don’t think they’re planning on teaching people how to use 3/4 of the advanced features they’ve added in the S4, and that’s an issue.

As Marty said, ideally we shouldn’t have to learn a lot of new stuff in order to start using a new phone effectively. Sometimes, however, a highly desirable feature requires some explanation, and until technology can make it “just work” advertising can be used to great effect. With the Galaxy S4, Samsung has seemingly shot themselves in the foot by adding too many non-obvious features that require that kind of external learning. Many of these features are also half-baked, which means they’ll serve primarily as annoying visual distractions and be perpetually turned off instead of improving the user’s digital life.

When your phone is less usable or easy-to-learn than the competition, then it’s immediately less powerful in the hands of a typical user, no matter how many processor cores it has. I think this is a point that often goes unsaid in the tech press, and I’m glad David Pierce made a note of the S4′s “overwhelming” number of features in his review. Technology for technology’s sake is a bad thing – at some point a phone’s design team needs to draw a line and withhold features that just don’t belong. The S4′s team apparently either A) decided not to draw that line or B) were overridden when they tried to speak up. Either way, I know that my grandpa shouldn’t be allowed near this device – he’ll think all the awesome-looking features will make his life easier, but they’d actually make it twice as complex as it already is.

Note: For more on the creation of the first cell phone (the DynaTEC) and Marty Cooper’s thoughts on the current smartphone landscape, check out The Verge’s interview with him from last year. Lots of interesting stuff in there.