Soft Arts

I started doing basic UI design in 1999, for JUDGE, a MUD engine written in Java with a Swing-based client.

Since that time I’ve worked on a lot of UI design, primarily with mainstream controls, but periodically with totally new controls and behaviors. I interviewed for a contract position yesterday and was there for almost four hours. During that time I talked with people working on technology applications and business development, the UI design team, and finally sat down and did some really enjoyable group programming with two of their developers. It also turned out that their Flash developer and I were classmates at the Cornish College of the Arts back in 1987. It was great seeing him and, honestly, would have made the visit worthwhile even if the interview had been bad, which it wasn’t.

I enjoyed talking with everyone, including the CEO, but I think that I had the most fun talking with the UI designers. The conversation started slow, I think because they were under the impression that they were talking with an embedded/server software developer.

One thing was apparent: they’re trying to find a simple, intuitive way to represent their service and they haven’t found a clear winner yet. We talked about this for awhile, and as they described the process they were trying to enable, I got a few ideas, and we spent a lot of time exploring them. By this point I think that we were all really excited.

Simple versus Intuitive

At one point the question of what constitutes an intuitive user interface came up. I had a moment of clarity and outlined the following:

There is simple and there is intuitive. Some of the simplest interfaces I have ever seen have been sufficiently non-intuitive enough to require some sort of training video, orientation program, or ad campaign in order to convey some kind basic paradigm shift in how to use them.

iPhone: Consider pinch zoom on the iPhone or double tapping to zoom in on a div. Landscape mode by turning the phone sideways. Every person that I’ve seen use it right away has been shown it, either in a commercial, during a keynote, or in the hands of another iPhone owner.

Windows Mobile: Windows Mobile require that you go through a mandatory orientation process when you start up for the first time. The tutorial makes you demonstrate that you know that holding down the stylus will cause a popup menu to appear.

Mentat: When you create a new account in Mentat, you are immediately assigned about a dozen simple tasks intended to get you familiar with how Mentat works. The first task simply says “EVERYTHING IS CLICKABLE.” After that are items like “Move your mouse over me” so that users can see controls appear, “Click the ‘i’ icon” so that users can see how the HUD works, etc.

The point is, everyone, including Apple, made some basic design choices that were simple, but COMPLETELY unlike what people were used to using before. Most of these controls are really simple: you just need to see them used once to have an ‘ah-ha!’ moment and be ready to try it yourself.

But if they were *intuitive* people would just start using them without being told anything.

An example

When I worked at Digital Harmony, the owner of the smoke shop next door bought his first computer, a laptop. He was teaching himself how to use it, and I came in to get some cigarettes. When I asked him how it was going he said “good, good! I learned something new today.” When I asked him what, he pointed at the URL bar in his browser.

“Ya see that?” he said, pointing to the URL field “You can’t just start typing. It won’t work. Ya got to click INSIDE that little bar before it will listen to what you are typing.” The man was a sixty-something Luddite and I didn’t feel disdain for him, but it certainly made me blink.

It was clear that, in most of our interactions with a computer, very little of it is really “intuitive.”

Best. Example. Ever.

But I really think that this was summed up best after our son Isaac was born. He was very ill and spent about 12 days in the neonatal intensive care unit with a chronic, very dangerous low-blood sugar condition. We were trying to get him to nurse and he was honestly having a little trouble with it.

The nurse attending us reassured us by saying “Don’t you worry, nursing may take him a minute to figure out, but once he does it will be completely natural to him.” After she walked out I muttered darkly to myself “you twit, if it was completely natural he wouldn’t have to figure it out.”

I relayed this story to the UI designers yesterday and got a laugh, but then my friend from Cornish said “you know, that’s about the most basic user interface humans have..” A long silence followed as we contemplated the impact of this idea on our field of work.

But what does it mean?

It means that, if you want an intuitive interface, you should stick to standardized UI conventions and regular input methodologies.

On the other hand, if you want to make a simpler and hopefully better user interface (and, I fervently hope, a better user experience) you’d better through the whole notion of ‘intuitive’ out the window and start figuring out how you’re going to let your users know what the new gimmicks are.

This could be mile high letters of flame, or a mandatory orientation, or simply a nice ad campaign showing someone using the new UI (the iPhone ads did this beautifully).

Do NOT do it as an optional tutorial under ‘Support’ and do NOT simply rely on web casts, because most users are not going to watch them or look for it. In our experience, the average user just starts the app and tries to figure it out cold.

If they can’t figure it out quickly, you are done. We had one person get mad using Mentat, because they didn’t know that they were supposed to click on things to change them. Another associate that had played with Mentat since the site went live tested out the tutorial for us.

When he came back he said “man, you guys really added a lot Mentat in the last couple of weeks.” We really hadn’t so I asked him what he meant “Well, the way all the controls come up when you move your mouse over stuff, that’s all new, right?” Well, actually all of that stuff had been there the entire time and he’d never played around with it enough to find out.

Bad news: Simple, revolutionary user interfaces are NOT intuitive.

Good news: if it’s truly simple, you can span the intuition gap, but you have to have a highly visible, pretty much unavoidable demonstration of the new technology for the users so that they can see the trick.

Technorati Tags:
Mentat, user interface design, GUI

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.