Cortlandt Winters wrote:
Andreas said
This is just my relatively uninformed opinion however, i'd love to hear
counterargumentation when it comes to the usability issue.
Hi Andreas,
I enjoyed your rant's but in the end they are reactionary nonsense.
Usability doesn't depend on the technology. It depends on design.
Silly bear!
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I disagree ;)
I think usability depends largely on habit and familiarity, more so than
design and "scholar" ideas of user friendliness. I believe conformity
under the design paradigms of a given OS is what makes an application
inherently user friendly. No matter of pointing arrows and step by step
tutorials can shake the fact that pointing arrows and step by step
tutorials were needed in the first place.
I've read my share of books on usability, and i work primarily with web
designers at the office who talk of nothing but usability. Their
knowledge comes from god knows how many bouts of user feedback, testing
and simple experience. My knowledge comes from building standalone
applications that are cross platform, and thus don't really need to
adhere to any OS interface paradigms beyond "click on stuff to do
stuff". You could say they adhere to a UI design philosphy of
familiarity, which plays on visual cues to give the user an inherent
understanding of the functionality based on her experience with the
framework UI of the platform (in this case the web browser). I on my
hand adhere to a tactile UI design philosophy, which plays on natural
action: Which is more intuitive for an "uninformed" user when asked to
stack boxes? To press two buttons, or to drag box a on top of box b?
However, whenever we've tried to couple these design philosophies, we
run into issues such as back button incompatibility, or users becoming
confused with regards to the flow of the website and the flow of the
application embedded in the website.
My last project, which i posted a crapload of photos of in the lounge
recently, was a tablet pc driven multiuser game installation intended
for school kids aged 13-15. We had a major issue deciding what was the
intelligent approach to the solution: To make the interface as hands on
and "Physical" as we could to play on the strengths of the
stylus/tablet, which turned out to be a bad decision. We chose to
implement hand writing based chat and a number of other
click-drag-push-pull-tap functionality that we carefully thought out to
adhere to our immediate sense of what the user logically would attempt
to do in the given situation, but it ultimately backfired on us. Kids
were looking for elements they knew from their own PCs, kids with
"computer experience" (if that's even a thing today) would always try
and take charge, or would be put in charge by those less sure of
themselves, and since we had gone to such lengths to simplify and
streamline the interface, we alienated them. Those that didn't know were
overriden by those that thought they knew, and those that thought they
knew were too jaded to simply accept how the interface actually worked.
For a game designed to be played *once* by a given group of individuals
over a period of 2 hours, this wasn't really what we wanted to do: We
had effectively pulled out the technical common ground from under their
feet.
The result was kids that were really intrigued by the technology and
that really caught on to it near the end, but who had spent the first
hour merely getting around the edges of it. For a game, you don't want
to fight the interface, you want to play. My boss thinks it was a
resounding success, i think it was a painful lesson: Don't screw with
the wheel: They know how the wheel works, don't make it octagonal, don't
turn it into a ball or a hovering disc of power or whatever. They know
the wheel turns, so let them turn the wheel if it reaches the same end.
I like the idea of creative and innovative interfaces, i really do. I'd
go as far as to say it's something i burn for, it's a lot of fun to work
with. Unfortunately, i'm a developer. So are you guys. It's so easy to
forget the end user, and in my own experience with focus testing, often
users who are negative are forgotten and users who are merely satisfied
or slightly positive are seen as proof of concept. I know this has
become more of a rant than anything, but i think dramatically altering
the flow of a website is a concept i hope people aren't taking lightly
in spite of the exciting technologies. I know we hate conformity, but in
UI design, i think you could almost call it a virtue.
I'm a reactionary nonsesical buffoon quite often, but this isn't a new
discussion to me and it's something that has always bugged me with Flash
development. I think there's a pretty stark limit to how far we can go
"cooling up" a site, and i think we need to learn how stark it is. At
least here in Norway ;)
- Andreas
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