...In the Pre-Silicon Period, you just picked up a telephone and dialed. Or you turned the radio on, twisted the tuning knob and there was Elvis or Ella. You didn't need an engineering degree from MIT. But a study by Laurence Feldman, a marketing expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reveals that today half of us find our high-tech possessions too complex to operate. Why are these things so befuddling?

The answer that springs to mind is: "Maybe you're not so bright, bub!" But I've been talking to experts on what might be called the Gadget Gap. And they say it's not our fault.

"It's a conspiracy of silence," says Don Norman, a leader in the burgeoning movement to make things easier to use and the author of The Design of Everyday Things. He argues that we're victims of our own shame: "When things don't work right, we all think it's our own fault, and nobody admits having trouble, so nothing changes."

Even engineers are getting flummoxed

Norman does have an engineering degree from MIT, and a PhD in something called mathematical psychology, but things fuddle him, too. A gray-whiskered gremlin with an astute eye, he chairs the department of cognitive science at the University of Califronia, San Diego. Cognitive science is the stud of the thinking process. Yet even Norman admits getting flummoxed by VCRs, hotel showers, kitchen stoves, light switches and doors. And he notes that the engineer who founded Digital Equipment Corporation once confessed he couldn't figure out how to heat coffee in a microwave oven.

Norman just sort of sidled into the Gadget Gap issue. He was studying mistakes, including his own flubs, because "human error" gets blamed for at least 75 percent of all industrial accidents. "I had people walking around with notebooks, writing down their mistakes," he says. He consulted with the nuclear power and aviation industries. "But the more I studied human error, like the accident at Three Mile Island, the more it didn't seem to be people's fault, but the design of the equipment they were using."

...Norman advocates "natural design," which means using principles like visibility to create products that we understand intuitively, without having to think about how they work.

...Another principle that designers often ignore is "natural mapping," which means arranging controls so it's clear what they do. Norman cites the example of kitchen stoves: the four burners are arranged in a square, but the four controls for the burners - and the oven controls - are usually in a straight line.

...As an example of doing it right, he points to the electric seat-adjustment control on a Mercedes-Benz: it is shaped like a seat. When you push or pull part of the control, such as the backrest, the corresponding part of the actual seat sinks or rises.

...Norman cites one more natural design principle: feedback. For example, when I make a call at home with our upstairs telephone, I hear a tone each time I push a button, which assures me I've done a good job of button pushing. With our downstairs phone... when I push the buttons I hear only a continual tapping sound, as if woodpeckers were on the line. With no feedback, I'm not sure I'm getting through to that wee operator I imagine sitting inside.

Designers who ignore principles like feedback, visibility and mapping frazzle our synapses. ..."All these controls - what does what?" Norman asks, disgusted, as we sit in his living room, where he is exhibiting what must be the world's largest private collection of TV and VCR remote controls. He is firing them at a large-screen TV, making a video a Japanese computer company sent him race forward, freeze, reverse and slow to a crawl. Meanwhile, he is analyzing each remote's pluses and minuses. "Here's one with some of the controls hidden under a flap, to make it less confusing," he says. "That's intelligent - but only if the hidden controls are the ones you don't use often." He flips up the flap, scans the revealed buttons and snorts. 'Note that here among the hidden controls is one for selecting channels!' he says.

...According to Thomas Hustad, a marketing expert at Indiana University's business school, one reason corporations often eschew consumer testing is to speed new models to market. "We've automated the design-and-delivery process so much that it can be faster to just keep putting out new variations of a product to replace ones that fail," says Hustad...Meanwhile, designers get techno-drunk. "They're carried away by the gee-whiz possibilities - it doesn't cost much to add this extra function, so let's throw it in," says Hustad. "The result is that technology is outstripping our ability to consume it." We confront the Swiss Army Knife Effect, in which a product performs so many functions you can't remember them all.

...It's up to the designers - only they can save us from technological angst. Norman, despite his impatience with user-oblivious product design, thinks they're up to it... Remote controls may be getting saner, too. Mitsubishi recently came out with a cigar-shaped wand with only the basic buttons. Unfortunately, it omits the one Norman says is used the most: "Mute," for turning off the sound during commercials.

...In response to disgruntled consumers, companies like Mitsubishi and Sony are working to make user manuals and TV on-screen instructions easier to understand.

Sure. But now that I've been Normanized, I want to know why nobody thought of all this a lot earlier - why the switch on my office lamp is mounted near the bulb, so that it gets too hot to touch. And why is the setting knob on my windup alarm clock so small, and so hard to turn, that I have to wrap it in the end of my handkerchief or use pliers? And why can't I figure out how to set the alarm on my digital watch?....