Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Once again they do a better job of explain what I was trying to say over at Creating Passionate Users – theres a nice graph of features vs happiness. Getting the balance right is important, but also the way the features are exposed to the user is important, you can get more features in before you hit the downward slope if you’ve got good User Interaction Design. What is interesting, from my point of view, is slightly overdoing the features, then dragging the users happiness point upward, so they can do more than they ever expected /and/ aren’t confused by how to do it. Why shouldn’t this change over time? Or with different types of usage?


Categories: Memories.

/ 8 Comments

8 comments

  1. sciamachy

    That’s what I like about my dad’s printer’s software – it had three modes (though not in the same sense as Kathy means when she refers to her next to unusable stereo) – beginner, intermediate and expert. The beginner mode looks like your typical hand-holding, warm and fuzzy, pastel-coloured Really User-Friendly Interface, which is so stripped down there are three buttons – scan, copy and print – and that’s it. Intermediate mode adds a few more controls, enough to vary the paper quality and print quality, and select between B&W and colour scanning and printing. Expert is a full-on industrial strength graphic artists’ tool which allows you to do literally anything you could think of. Each user interface builds on the last, so controls don’t move once you learn their function and location, so there’s a gradual, shallow learning curve up to the point where you get full access to everything.

    That said, my dad’s still too “challenged” after all his strokes to get even the basic interface under his belt for more than 5 minutes at a stretch, and he’s too blind to recognise a progress bar for what it is, so when his prints don’t come out immediately, he forgets where he’s at and thinks it’s not working. Proof that even the best software will rely at some point on decent grey matter. It’s infuriating, and very distressing – this is the guy who at one point used to say “I only need to see a job done once, and I can do it” – and was largely right about that.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Its sad to see that happening, but I’m not sure theres anything that software can really do to help…

      …but I like the sound of that printer software, seems like they got a part of the idea, at least it provides a mechanism to have three peaks in the happiness/features graph, and once you’re used to one level you can crank up the complicated-ness if you feel you want to. Now what is interesting for me is the possibility that the software can, rather than be switched by hand, move its peak gradually and without the user noticing. In much the same way a good teacher would advance with you as you learn the subject.

      Reply
  2. jarkman

    There’s some good stuff on this by Rob Haitani, who did the PalmOS UI design. You can find some of it in here:
    http://www.bookpool.com/sm/1558606009

    You’re right, it’s not so much the size of the featureset that’s important, it’s the way the features are packaged. A new user must be able to get their work done without really becoming aware of the existence of the features they don’t need. As they become more familiar with the app, they need to extend their understanding of it gradually.

    It can be very hard to do, though. When you embed some smart but complicated feature into your data model, it can be very hard to hide all traces of it.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Yes, thats been on my list-of-things-to-read for a while, but its going to have to wait a while, theres too much to learn.

      In a similar vein I’d recommend the Invisible Computer….this looks interesting too, just to balance it out, but I’ve not read it yet.

      Getting the balance right is difficult, but there are also few managers who actually understand the problem, and those that do are under constant pressure from their marketing department to tick the feature boxes without consideration of how *useful* the features are.

      Reply
      • jarkman

        Ta – I’ll give them a read.

        The tragic thing is, the marketing department are not wrong. Adding a few features really does make an update of an app, and it really does make it easier to sell. And, obviously, it’s even hard to add complex features in a graceful, hideable way after the fact than it is to add them when the app is first designed.

        Setting out to make the best possible app, with an approprately-restricted feature set and a nice progressive learning curve, is a rare luxury. We don’t have any management to worry about (being the management ourselves) and even we don’t get the chance very often.

        Reply
        • neilh

          Sure, its a difficult balance, but having some of the ideas from these kinds of books in mind while you’re making software will help make it easier.

          I recently wrote an application for a small company, they were quite flumoxed by the idea that it didn’t actually need a UI at all – their brief to me was to make it as simple to use as possible, which to me meant that it didn’t need to interact with the user. This is probably an extreme case, since its essentially a data-passing app, and data arrives from a seperate unit and is passed on to another unit. No interaction needed. The application has a single menu option ‘quit’, and that doesn’t work in the production environment.

          Reply
          • jarkman

            Oh, absolutely. These are important things to strive for, but expressing them as recipes makes them seem much simpler than they are.

            It’s like saying ‘to be rich, earn a lot of money and spend very little’. It’s true, as far as it goes, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

          • neilh

            Its not the whole picture – you’ve got to look at what your customer *wants*. Thats a different thing from what the marketing department says your customer wants.

            Forgetting the commercial constraints is going to get you in trouble, like expecting to get rich while spending more than you’re earning.

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