UI Constraint and User Success
Tuesday, April 25, 2006In his entry " Fear and Loathing in Lotus Hannover", Notes guru, Nathan Freeman, rants against creeping complexity in rich client interfaces and the next Lotus Notes release 'Hannover' in particular. In it he makes an interesting point regarding the iPod interface that got me thinking.
The user is so constrained that there's simply no way to do something wrong.
–Fear and Loathing in Lotus Hannover
There's always a tradeoff between UI constraint and functional complexity in software but I would also express this idea as "The way to do something wrong is clear to the user through UI constraint" a subtle but important difference.
Most rich client UIs suck because there's no way to tell which is the wrong way to do something. Most of my users click a button after guessing which might be the right one and if it was the wrong button to push for that task they are punished. The punishment could be for example:
- an error for a completely different task
- a prompt for further intereaction for a completely different task
- destruction of data
It makes the user confused and hesitant to try to work it out and then they require more support.
The best rich client interfaces indicate which is the wrong way to do a task. Now this sounds like a dumb thing to say but I'll clarify it. Rich client interfaces offer more choice and so they have to be able to show the user, in a gentle fashion, that they are doing something they shouldn't. In a sense, instead of punishing they must fail to reward. Because the natural motivation for user action is reward, failing to reward will encourage the user to discover the right way to do it.
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