| Saturday, January 6, 2007 |
15:11 - When eating your own dogfood doesn't work
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,241578,00.html
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Interesting story her on user interface design—particularly so in that it could have just as easily been written in 1995 or even 1985. We're still using terms like "save" and "load" in our user interfaces, and they're apparently still just as confusing to novice users as ever.
This is why interface design is so deceptively hard. Any geek might think he knows how to make a program simple to use; but he's a geek. He doesn't think like a user who doesn't have an instinctive understanding of how the underlying software works. The article focuses on your typical Microsoft apps, but even a program like iTunes is chock-full of quirky little behaviors that nobody in their right mind should be expected to expect; like why does it take half a minute for a manually-mounted iPod to disappear after you've clicked the Eject button? Why do you have to "import" songs from your CDs into the iTunes Library? Why does the Pause button change to a Stop button if you switch to another input source while you're playing music? All these things make sense after a technical explanation, but only if you're the kind of person to whom a technical explanation is relevant. That doesn't count most people.
Here's something I hadn't realized:
People who write software programs value control. The user, on the other hand, just wants something that's easy to operate.
To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature.
I'll bet that's true. Geeks I know, particularly interface geeks, love the opportunity to tweak levers and buttons, to give themselves more power and control; it's of a piece with why they write software to begin with. But their audience doesn't speak the same language, and very few interface guys—only the really, really good ones—are multilingual.
Via JMH.
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Brian Tiemann
