It’s been a while since I wrote something on design. I have been gathering my thoughts recently and this is the result.
User interfaces are everywhere. From the newspaper you read in the morning, checking emails at office, dispensing coffee, visiting a hospital, even your alarm clock. Good user interfaces, well that’s something else!
Imagine for a moment that you’re an alien from Mars approaching Earth to conquer it. You walk out from your spaceship and find something on the ground that you can hold in your hands. Suddenly, it starts emitting a shrill noise, and with the fright you drop it thinking it’s a weapon or worse, a bomb. It falls to the ground, but the shrill sound doesn’t stop. It does look pretty harmless though, so you pick it up. You examine it and you find something that is protuding out. You press it down and the alarm clock that you are holding in your hands goes silent. Obviously, since you haven’t been introduced to the context of a clock, you have no clue whatsoever what a “circular face with some writings” with two “hands” makes a clock. But you also need to be introduced to the context of the button on top of the clock that turns off the alarm. Without that knowledge you would have no idea of how to turn it off.
Same goes for all the other physical and virtual objects we interact with everyday. It is the endeavour of us designers to make our life difficult in order to make the object simple and easy to use for the user. Now what defines “simple and easy?”. The interface should be simple enough to be understood by your Mom and easy enough to not require a manual to use. This is the greatest usability test one can try. Before releasing a design or uploading a website, show it to your mom and ask her what she thinks of it. Can she use it within 5 minutes of your introducing her to it? This is something I keep in mind whenever I design and it is my constant endeavour to simplify. That’s not always the easiest thing to do, and sometimes functionality comes in the way. And then you have to compromise one for the other.
Let me take an example. My mom had her first email account on Rediff. She was quite used to that interface and even when they updated it, she chose to stick on to the old interface. She knows her way around there – from where to find contacts, to where all the email folders are. I recently got her signed up on gmail. She started using it parallely with rediff. After a couple of weeks I happened to notice her using gmail. She was finding it quite difficult to grasp the concept of how the emails are displayed and why do they have a number in brackets next to the ones she had replied to etc. I then told her that it is not a single mail, but gmail shows them as conversations. It was only then that she understood the concept and then she had overcome her fear of using gmail and started using it regularly. I’m sure you have had a similar experience when you use a service for the first time. Unless you have seen a tutorial video or read up some instructions, it is very difficult to get started immediately.
The results of the test are quite intangible and feedback that you can get from it can be very vague at times. Visual/Textual cues are very important to ease navigation around an interface. Use large readable text wherever possible. Use graphical icons to indicate function if the text becomes too much. Avoid clutter and use colours to differentiate various aspects of the interface. Also, efficiency is the key – doing the absolute most possible with what you have.
The tips above are very basic and can be used by anyone who’s making an interface. Special attention to software developers who are often required to do UI work as part of their job. Don’t try to make your life easier by making things complex. Complicate your life to make your user’s life simple.
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Loved the way this is written ! the end note is worth remembering for anyone working for other’s benefit and services
niiice !
[...] This post was Twitted by sidv [...]
Loved this! I Everyone can connect to the instances you have stated here. Makes me wonder how complicated UI’s still exist?? Motorola still sells- feature heavy but difficult to use-phones
Guess some people need to go back to school to get their basics right..
The difficulty is that easy for someone is difficult for another – how do you survey and sample the target audience for some new UI that you would publish?
ah, the problems of life!
thanks for the comment guys.
@kartikay – i think instead of trying to design UIs for specific target users, classify your users by age and design for that instead! coz everyone is human after all!
Not only age, Sid, but also based on culture, interests, etc.. you should really know how to be a (P.C.) Separatist.
The ad industry uses focus groups to get feedback, is that the kind of surveying you’re talking about for UIs, Kartikay? I don’t think UI designers have that privilege. Game designers do, though, and still most design utterly shit UIs, so I don’t think it helps. I mean, how many times do I need to scare the shit out of my pants in the middle of the night at that unexpected LOUD EA SPORTS Intro Sound EFFECTS on my earphones huh?
Moms might be a good place to start…though not my mom
The thing about moms is that they love everything you do. GMail is not your product, so moms can shit-talk about it all they want (initially) but when it comes to your big break, you’re mom’s gonna call it the best darn UI in the UIverse (pardon the pun).
cheers
@nav – the reason why i talk about our moms is that they’re uninitiated. they haven’t grown up with computers or electronic devices around them, so a lotta times they don’t get technology! the thing is, my mom doesn’t shit talk about gmail, she just doesn’t use it the way it’s supposed to be! so it’s that reason i’m saying that they’re the best source for first level feedback, the kinds that don’t need focus groups!
By using mom and shit-talk in the same sentence, I meant that the uninitiated audience dislikes the UI for being a little bit cryptic. The uninitiated don’t have the experience of knowing the difference between good and bad UI design. It turns out to be an act of listening to an amateur for professional opinion. Even though it would provide good insights and is a good idea, it’s not the greatest test (in the professional sense). The uninitiated need to learn and explore, just like your mom finally did with GMail Conversations, how to navigate a UI.
The last sentence is Confucius-like in it’s wisdom, though… it goes for almost all aspects of design.
What I find a negative force propagating in the design world these days, particularly web design, is exactly that point: making the user’s life simple. Users are becoming more and more sophisticated these days, if you’re making your UIs simple, you are presuming to penetrate the largest audience possible… is that really a good thing in a culture that ridicules mass-produced, samey-looking, samey-doing products?
In other words, make your UI as true to the concept as possible. The concept is God. It’s the interpretation of the concept the audience needs to understand in order to navigate a UI. Like the interpretation of ‘Pinching’ for zoom in Touch interfaces. Or the concept of Conversations in GMail interpreted as a stack of emails. Interpretation can be done by anyone, though, whether simple or hard to understand. In this way, you will make sure your UI is interpreted well by the main people, which is the target audience, which is the only audience that understands the concept in the best possible way and hence is most equipped with how to navigate it. An example would be The Matrix website’s UI.
I will disagree with you there. The purpose of “designing” a UI is to make it “usable”. HCI has a lot of research and rules in place for what’s “usable”. How will you determine the target audience for the UI? Anyone who will use your service is part of your target audience. And specially designing for something on the web, you cannot restrict your target audience to technically more advanced people. You will still have new users on gmail who don’t understand how the hell conversations work unless they’re told about it!
The problem with keeping it true to the concept is that people who came up with the concept may not know jack about usability.
Did you understand anything about the matrix UI? It would have been so much different if you could understand what Tank was controlling and how he was sending those programs to Neo! The matrix is probably the worst UI ever!
All of those conceptions might work as the safest approach. Additionally, people don’t come up with the concept. An artist or designer or creative person/team comes up with the concept. That’s what they are being paid for. Otherwise, you just act as a computer operator for their brain. And those new users on GMail who still don’t understand conversations will one day, eventually get it, and on that day they will appreciate it more. Till that day comes, they can use hotmail or Y! Mail just like the people still using the older, slower mail services to send letters.
Sending programs to Neo on The Matrix UI?! Dude, I mean the first website of The Matrix movie on the internet, which had hidden links and messages and stories talking about an alternate reality, which in turn formed the first ever largest Alternate Reality Gaming community. That’s utilising a concept in cyberspace. Something similar to the viral websites for The Dark Knight, but a hell lot more. What I’m saying is that UI needs to be faithful to the concept the target audience identifies, more than it needs to be to a more (or less) skilled audience.
Hm, it’s not a bad ‘rule of thumb’, howevet you should be designing for you user base, so unless you mum is your target audience this isn’t particulrly helpful.
It’s not always a case of making it ‘as easy as possible’ to use, but intuitive. Intuitive to you or I might be different to your mum; however if that product is for you and me, then introducing you mum into the equation isn’t always helpful.
As I say, not a bad mantra, however it should remain as that; I think actually using your mum as a test study is taking the mantra a little too far.
The other major issue here is that you’re limiting your testing to ONE user; which is shockingly bad practice in any case. A lot of what we do is based around affordance; and if one person hasn’t been exposed to a particular metaphore then it could flag your design as a failure, even if it’s a success.
‘The greatest usability test’ is the one that is most appropriate for your designated user personas; this is where the expertise of an IA comes in; if it were as simple as showing it to your mum then anyone could perform professional grade usability studies; which they most certainly can’t.
FYI @Navneet If you’re a professional UI designer working on high-budget products that generate large revenue, then yes, you ‘should’ most certainly work with focus groups. If you’re on the lower end of the scale then you use testing groups (which are in many ways the same thing).
It’s down to how much the company cares about usability; fortunately I’m in a company that focusses heavily on it; and we certainly don’t use our mums, cause they don’t use our products.
@nathan – it is meant to be a rule of thumb while designing UIs. Also interesting is the number of people who have to design UIs and have no experience whatsoever. Specially prevalent in the software companies of the Indian IT Sector. This would give them something to think about
I don’t use my mum for my usability testing! It’s just an observation that products that are meant for everyone may not necessarily take people like my mum (relatively uninitiated) into consideration. Even if they do, it results in a longer learning curve.
I once had a professor archeology who threw a packet of cigarettes to a student and asked her what she could deduct if she found this at a 1000 year old site..
She replied “that people were smoking back then”
He asked her to throw back the cigarettes, pulled one out and stuck it in his ear.
- “Smoking ? What is smoking ?” He replied..
User Interfaces should be clear on how people can do stuff.
But first of all, they should know where they are and what they can do with it.