Convenience vs Practicality

We like to think Convenience and Practicality are synonymous, that one must lead to the other, but in truth this isn't always the case.  I was looking for a gift for someone and as is cliché there was that disclaimer "batteries not included" - side note, that movie of the same name was one of my favourites as a kid, although it hasn't aged well sadly, it's also a bit depressing that almost everyone in the main cast of the movie is dead now, but then it was 32 years ago and most of them were quite old at the time anyway.  That little disclaimer though is often a point of inconvenience for most people, the reason it is there though is because most manufacturers don't know or can't guarantee how long their products will be in storage before they are bought.

If manufacturers did include batteries they'd likely be flat by the time you bought the product or would have a short shelf life.  Unless the product comes with rechargeable batteries it would actually pose more frustration to the consumer to find out the batteries don't work - ask yourself how many times you have bought something that does come with a rechargeable battery and you actually followed the instructions that tell you to fully charge it before you use it for the first time as opposed to how many times you just used the product expecting it to work?

If you were to be asked to give a word that really is synonymous with convenience for you as a consumer, what word would you give?  For me in my experience both as someone who has worked in retail in the past, and as a consumer myself, the word "immediate" is synonymous with convenience, that is to say people want things now, without delay, without having to wait, that is how convenience is now defined.  The word itself however is supposed to mean something that is useful or of benefit to you, in that sense you can argue there is some parallel to the concept of practicality.  In the traditional sense of the word convenience everything is measured by the amount of difficulty or the ease with which you can do something.

As for the word practicality, that too has become a misconception.  We tend to think of practical things as being those that just work, but that's not the case either.  In the traditional sense of the word, once again, it was defined as something else.  Practicality was traditionally defined as something that is effective and does what it is supposed to do, there was no measure of difficulty involved.  Whether something is simple or complex to use, whether you can just pick it up or whether you have to learn how to use it first, these never factored into the definition before, and yet these are now characteristics we apply to almost everything when we decide whether or not it is practical.

I am a programmer among many other things and the main measure of practicality that most users now have when it comes to software is whether or not they can figure out how to do something with it, not how efficiently or effective it is at doing its job.  This creates a disparity between the end user and the designer.

The concepts of Convenience and Practicality although traditionally nothing to to with simplicity, immediacy, and ease of use, have now been transformed, they take on new meanings and you can see the evolution of language taking place.  There are many words that today mean very different things to their original and distant past forms, we like to think that these changes happened long ago and that the language we use today has a constant meaning that doesn't evolve before our eyes, but the more you pay attention to the world, and yes, the older you become, the more you become aware of the changes that are happening all around us.

I realise that I mention age quite a bit, but this isn't done in terms of absolute values, I don't impose a figure that states once you reach age X you should have learned this or that, all I imply with these references to growing older is that life is the accumulation of experience, and whilst you can have many different experiences and you can be much more experienced in some fields than others despite being the same age, one simple truth remains: the longer you live, the more life experience you have.  How much you learn along the way depends entirely on how much you pay attention to the world.  Life will give you many lessons along the way, but they do not come in convenient forms, you have to expend some effort to discern the truth and the meaning from those lessons.  Likewise your life is lived not through theory but through practice, your experience will come from the act of doing, and again the lessons and the true meaning of what you experience won't simply present itself, you'll have to stop and look at what you have experienced and try and find that meaning.