The world is full of intelligent people. I am constantly amazed at the ability of people to create new things, most often by applying existing ideas in interesting new ways. I love getting that “aha!” moment when I realize how they’ve taken an existing paradigm and applied it in inventive ways somewhere else. On a side note, whenever I have such an “aha!” moment I think of Brian Regan’s comedy skit on youtube where he discusses the instructions for eating Pop Tarts…
“#1. Remove pastry from pouch”
Pause… look at Pop Tart… pause… look at instructions…
“I see where they’re going with this!”
If you haven’t seen the video, go see it. Very funny.
Unfortunately, good software design often tries to eliminate that surprise moment, because frankly users are for the most part not interested in surprises. They don’t want to read instructions, they don’t want cleverness, they just want to get from point A to point B in the least amount of time. The hard part for application interface designers is understanding what A is and what B is. What do they know already? What must they know in order to complete the task? What do they want to do? You run into design troubles when you don’t understand the user’s context. If you are not sure what they know, then you may feel compelled to add information to the interface that betters explains their current situation. If you are not sure what they want to do, then you may throw in some extra buttons just in case. Soon enough you’re looking at a pretty busy interface that works well for experienced users but leaves novices scratching their heads, saying “How do I get that goodness in me?” or words to that effect. (see the video)
Designers often resort to physical paradigms to help guide users towards their goals. You may recall the Microsoft Bob product where the computing tasks were arranged as icons inside rooms in a house. This was taking physical paradigms way too far and the computing marketplace voted the product off the shelf with a huge collective raspberry. But at the heart of it they had a good idea – computing is almost entirely an abstraction and the most successful interfaces hide away as much of the abstraction as possible. The problem with Bob was that it required too much of an investment into the paradigm – you had to remember that the spreadsheet application was found in the kitchen and Paint was in the bathroom, or wherever you last found it, and if you don’t remember then you have to poke around going from room to room trying to find it. I don’t like playing “Where’s Waldo?” with my applications, so I tried Bob for a few minutes then went back to “Windows Classic” and stuck with it ever since. Even the tweaks that Microsoft has been adding to Windows over the years since Bob go straight into the trash bin on my desktop. Gone is the Vista interface, the XP interface and the Windows 7 interface. First thing I do is make the Start bar icons small, turn off menu personalization (the “feature” that shows you only menu items that you’ve used recently) make all the system files visible and default to the file details in Explorer. But that’s because I am already familiar with the paradigm and don’t want surprises.
Sometimes an interface comes along that does what you would expect and in a way that is at first surprising, then obvious. An intense “aha!” moment came to me a while back when I first saw the “pinch gesture” on the iPhone which zooms out the view and the “unpinch” that would zoom in. I don’t know where the idea for this came from but it is certainly clever. Amazingly, once they understand the gesture then immediately they start using it in the correct manner. It maps so nicely onto what they expect that the zoom/pan abstraction is pushed aside and they just run with it. So I asked myself the question “If I were involved in the iPhone project, would I have come up with that design?”. I suspect I would. But don’t interpret this as me saying I’m so wonderful. Frankly I think that if you got enough people into a room and told them to design gestures that could only be done by one or two fingers on a small pad, displaying interfaces that are usually much larger than the available space, then fed them lots of coffee and pizza and kicked out the boors who can’t seem to stop talking, and soon enough somebody would dream up pinch and unpinch. People are clever!