For a user-friendly interface
Why is it so difficult to get something that is easy
to use?
JHUMKEE IYENGAR
Have you tried to sell your camera on the Internet and
wondered, after your fourth try, whether its worth it
and gave up? Have you tried to book an airline
ticket using your frequent flyer miles and after
wandering for 25 minutes in vain looking for where the
information is buried, just quit? Have you tried
to get your three favourite songs to play on your
cellphone and after an hour spent on your cell, the
operators website and music sites, just thrown your
hands up?
Welcome to life in the 21st century, where software is
an intrinsic part of our lives and nothing is simple
anymore.
Why does this happen? Because:
* Users come to a site with particular goals and
expectations in mind. To pay a bill, find the lowest
fare, search for a press article, buy a book etcetera,
and
* Designers of the software often do not have a clue
what those goals are.
Users do not find the information they want, get
lost/confused and log off. Its a loss of revenue,
goodwill and potential referrals. Yet, you hear the
term easy to use all the time. Since it is
recognised as an important component for customer
satisfaction and business success, it is claimed
virtually
by everyone.
Why, then, is easy to use so hard to get? Surely,
engineers do not deliberately create unusable designs.
Why are things so unfriendly? Because it takes
more than engineers to design a success. It takes a
Sociology + Engineering + Psychology + Graphic Design
perspectives. In typical design processes, software
firms ignore all except the engineering perspective.
And maybe some of the Graphic Design perspective. They
also assume that ease-of-use will automatically
happen.
They forget that it takes planning. This involves an
indepth understanding of the engineers mental map and
the users. It is the intersexion space of the
two goal-seeking sets that offers the platform for
success. But typically, software is created only from
a technology perspective, with the user left out.
This is what leads to usage shock, the result of the
disconnect between the human mind and the computer
mind. The human mind expects one thing, and the
computer provides something else.
The goals are different. The engineers goal is to
make the product work and hence ease of development
drives the effort. The users goal is to have needs
satisfied. An engineer may claim to be a
The user thinks, Oh, I guess its under Special
Services. No, I dont see it here. Okay, how about
Other? No not here either... what the heck does
Redemption Qualifiers mean?, while the developer
thinks, Redemption is under Memberships, isnt it
obvious?
Design must take into account people as they are, not
as computers would like them to be. If software must
get user-friendly, developers must start talking
to sociologists, psychologists and linguists.
Psychology principles like attention, memory,
perception and so on all have a major role to play.
For example,
we must display no more than about seven items on a
list. And we must not expect users to remember a small
chunk of information longer than 20 seconds
after viewing. These are the limits of human
short-term memory.
Thankfully, ease-of-use can be managed. It can be
planned, predicted, designed and measured. For this,
the method of analysis and design must involve
actual end users and their actual expectations (not
just stated ones). This is a new field called
Usability Engineering. It involves first understanding
user behaviour with the product in use (say, at a
bank, supermarket cash counter or hospital reception).
Then, it tests the software in a usability lab,
before the final encoding is done.
That contains costs by reducing rework, development
time, training time, support costs and others. It
maximises usage, productivity, brand appeal and
profitability.
Some businesses are put off by the fuzzy-wuzzy sound
of all this. But mapping the users mental model is
not some eclectic art. Humans expect a system
to behave in a certain way, based on their own
internal thought processes, and if the products
design matches this, it is easy to use. So, what
happens
in the mind needs to be understood.
Today, most firms pay lip service to usability by
ensuring a pretty screen for the bosses to marvel at.
But a pretty screen is no guarantee of the user
experience. This depends on the basic design
structure, the brain behind the screen, which is
prohibitively expensive to rework. It is much better
to
have had the end user in mind at the very onset of the
enterprise.
Once we recognise the fact that designing from both
sides of the screen makes business sense, we can
refine our methods to include both technology and the
user. Usability Engineering has proven itself with
many success stories already. As developers and
designers of products, we must not unleash convoluted
designs onto hapless victims. Easy does not have to be
that difficult!
The author is a consultant with User In Design and
Persistent Systems. These are her personal views
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