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Critiques
Slanty (and underhanded) Design
I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed.
Countdown to a spanking
XP: Are you SURE you don't want to restart now?
A constant thorn in my side from our use of Windows XP as our primary workstations is the Automatic Updates feature. In explaining my frustration to others, I've inevitably compared it to very similar behavior in Mac OS X, which for some reason does not drive me insane. I've been unable to put my finger on the difference until just this morning. Where OS X also presents a modal (non-closeable) dialog that requires an action, Windows floats that dialog above everything else, forcing the issue. With OS X, I can happily continue about my day, and decide to restart only when it is convenient for me. XP on the other hand, requires a 'Restart Now' or a 'Restart Later' before it gets out of my way, and choosing 'Restart Later' begins a Sisyphean cycle of misery until finally the computer has had enough of your sandbagging and counts down an automatic restart, like a mother counting down the time you have left before you get a spanking.
What a difference being able to click away makes.
Startle wayfinding
Axel Peemoeller’s wayfinding system for the Melbourne Eureka Tower Carpark has been making the internet rounds. Props to him, it’s a novel and eyecatching design. (See below for one example from his site.) But something about it makes me think it’s disorienting (and possibly dangerous) for drivers. Let me try and articulate my amateur cognitive science/interaction design theory to explain.
While driving, your brain’s 3D systems are in high gear. (Pardon the pun.) Your mind is tuned to look for positioning cues such as occlusion, parallax, and especially size changes. This last is most important, as your visual system is on the lookout for anything that suddenly grows larger than the things around it, which would be a clear sign that you’re about to hit something. It’s called the startle response, and it happens within about 80 milliseconds, far too fast for any rational processing to counteract it.
So now, think of yourself in the Eureka Tower Carpark. Turning a corner, you’re a little confounded by the strange and lovely colored shapes on the wall. What’s going on here? All of a sudden, your visual system puts all these shapes together in a way that could only make sense if there was something (in this case, typography) jumping out right in front of you. Your gut reaction should be to slam on the brakes, even if your logical brain can decipher the thing a few milliseconds later. Hopefully the driver behind you left enough room.
So I haven’t been there, and I don’t know if this conjecture bears out in fact, but the pictures certainly set off my startle reaction.
Important visual design principles for interface design
Now that everyone at Cooper has committed to writing a more frequent Journal, I’ve found myself reading a lot more blogs. That’s not to say that I wasn’t happily browsing and sponging before, but I’ve been really consumed by other people’s opinions lately. For instance, Ryan Singer of 37 Signals pointed to an interesting UI discussion just a few weeks ago. The discussion began in the comment area of a screenshot posted to Flickr, and it related to an iPhone application called Triplog/1040 by Stevens Creek Software; I've pasted the photo below.
The screenshot received a great deal of negative criticism. The customer reviews at the iTunes store have been equally negative, and the average rating is currently 1 ½ stars out of 5. (Not great if you’re looking to earn revenue on your application and there are several competitors challenging you).
So what to do about it? Well, I *could* critique the screen with additional constructive thoughts but I feel like Steve, the designer, has received enough suggestions and probably is not looking for more feedback. (If my work had received that kind of attention I think I might quit and become a barista). Instead, I’ll highlight a few visual design principles that this conversation sparked in my mind.
First impressions count
Just like you gain an instant impression when you meet a person for the first time, the same is true for interfaces. Called the Aesthetic-Usability Effect in Universal Principles of Design, this principle highlights the important role that visual design plays when designing products:
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs — whether they are or not ... Aesthetic designs are more effective at fostering positive attitudes than unaesthetic designs, and make people more tolerant of design problems.
The discussion about the Triplog software has been all about how unusable it looks despite the application not being available at the time to use. That’s not to say there aren’t usability flaws but a visual design with more organization and the right prioritization would go a long way to improving the perceived usability of the application.
Dense doesn’t have to be ugly but it does require you to be smarter
Much criticism of the Triplog interface was about the screen being too cluttered. But as Steve pointed out, his users need to view all of that information at the same time. I'm not challenging whether information should be removed but am reminded that for screens with high information density it is more important to use visual design techniques to organize the structure and flow of content as well as prioritize the most important information in a way that’s easily scannable.
Looking at a dense interface is like listening in a restaurant. When the restaurant is quiet it’s easy to hear the person you’re dining with but if the restaurant is busy and there’s a lot of background noise then it takes a lot more effort to hear and understand what the person sitting opposite is saying. You can do it but it takes a lot more work and isn’t as much fun.
Dense interfaces should have a clear visual hierarchy with a maximum four or five levels of distinction. Dense screens should be designed so that similar interface elements share attributes such as size, shape and color or proximity. Dense information should be organized so that elements are aligned to an underlying grid, which aids scanning. Finally, dense screens should contain minimal gratuitous noise that doesn’t support the user interaction.
Be different if you want to be remembered
Several people offered constructive ideas in the discussion. Some even went as far as to quickly mock up how they would design the interface (see here and here). Some resulted in screen designs that looked very similar to Apple’s UI guidelines for the iPhone.
I recognize that these mock-ups were done extremely quickly, but the alternatives run the risk of being too generic to be memorable, looking too much like an iPhone utility and not enough like a unique, useful, and original application. I’m the first to recommend standard UI best practices, but standards need not get in the way of establishing a brand. (Some commenters even preferred the bright blue background in Steve’s design to the more familiar iPhone UI, perhaps because it is unique and memorable).
It’s an exciting time to be in visual interface design
Okay, this may not be a principle, but it’s worth mentioning. There are all kinds of new digital products with interfaces that are changing the world we live in, and it’s exciting to see, discuss, and participate in this movement. Apple’s iPhone is one great example. New technologies require new thoughtful design. Now I just need to figure out what iPhone app I’m going to design and sell on iTunes.
Well-Designed Products
A common affliction plaguing many of us interaction designers is the propensity to complain and kvetch about every piece of software on our computers, cell-phones and cars. And it's true—there is a lot of bad software out there.
To offset this sometimes irritating tendency to critique and redesign everything we see, I'd like to offer a selection of software that I consider to be truly well-designed. To avoid creating a list that is simply an expression of my personal taste (which of course it is, to some extent), I devised some criteria as necessary aspects of a well-designed software product.
Critic to Creator: Recognizing Good Design
Someone always asks the question, and I am never ready for it.
"So, what products out there are well-designed?"
As an interaction designer, I learn about users and design a product that helps them meet their goals—one that is tailored to the way they work. Yet this question can still stump me. I am not alone: all too often, people in our field focus so much on pointing out the egregious interaction design mistakes that make it to market, we forget to pay attention to the good design that exists. Not only does it make our profession look bad if we are always complaining, but it also makes us less effective. How can we create good products if we can only articulate what “bad” is?
Do U SMS? Text Messaging is Not the Hassle it Once Was
Few modes of communication burden the user with as much interaction hassle as text messaging on mobile phones. Without help from word-prediction assistants, the word "Hello" requires 13 button-presses, not including an additional 5 to get from the start screen to the messaging app. Nevertheless, the clear benefits of short text message services (SMS) have lured untold millions into uncomfortable, not to say unsatisfying, partnerships with their mobile phones.
Notable Product: How Nokia´s 8290 Does Something Right
Most people buy mobile phones because they want to be able to make phone calls anywhere, anytime. All the other stuff that's crammed into phones—calculators, game players, text-messaging capability—represents incomplete solutions for problems that are better served by devices dedicated to those needs. If I want to play a game on the go, I won't buy a Nokia 8290.
Still, phones offer a lot of sophisticated functionality to support specific mobile phone needs. Users need a way to quickly change ring-tones, ring volume, and message alert tones—so phone manufacturers allow you to tweak these so that one's phone can behave appropriately as one moves from the construction site to the movie theater.
Learning From the Mistakes of Internet Banks
Retail banks are realizing that Internet banking is not living up to the hype that surrounded it a few years ago. At that time, analysts predicted that demand would follow the trends in general Internet usage and grow to hundreds of millions of users by the middle of this decade. Some brave entrepreneurs were even betting that the age of the branch-based deposit institution was over, and that upstart "Internet-only" banks would be able to capitalize on hot new technology to steal all the customers. Yet adoption rates are low, and customer interest is flagging. Why? Online banking is a good example of how bricks-and-mortar institutions can stumble when they try to solve new economy problems with old world approaches.
What We Can Learn From the Fender Stratocaster
I must admit I'm not terribly impressed by the quality of today's software—my benchmark for good product design isn't defined by the output of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or other respected software companies. Those companies produce some good work, of course, but the software industry, though no longer in its infancy, still seems to be working through its gawky adolescent stage. So, when I think about high quality products, I think of BMW automobiles, Eames furniture, and the Fender Stratocaster guitar.
Beating the Checkout Blues
Your online store is a good example of the breed. You've got good products at good prices, the site navigation is straightforward, the product information is rich, appropriate, and easy to find, and everyone likes the clean, uncluttered visual design of the site. So why do more than half of your customers abandon their full shopping carts?
Depending on which research report you read, roughly 25% to 75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before consummating the deal. Despite the disparity in numbers, all the research firms agree on one thing: that's way too many.
Time Travel Design
In this month's newsletter, Tony refers to a Washington Post story titled The End-User View of Techo-Nirvana: Blink, Blink, Blink. The Washington Post writer had this to say about Video Cassette Recorders:
That flashing "12:00" has become a symbol of technology as tyranny, taunt, impotence, ignorance, intimidation, humiliation, stone in the shoe and pain in the butt. It stands for innovation created without humans in mind. Yet humans have grown to live with it. To expect it. To adjust themselves to the selfishness of these machines. Like sheep.
Email it to us and we may answer it in an upcoming article.