Tag Archives: UX

Someone save ‘save as’!

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Lion-NoSaveAs

Um, but what if I want to rename this version of the file?

This post makes me feel old. I sound a little like my father, or grandfather. And who knows, at 43, maybe I’m crossing over into that time where adapting to changes takes a little more effort than my roll-with-it 20′s and 30′s.

In the tech space, you live like a shark. You can’t stop swimming forward or you die. I get it. From a business perspective tech companies need to update and refine their products continually to keep up with competitors and maintain their brand image as being leading edge or whatever. I know Google and other companies are looking 10 years ahead at a time when much more will be in the ‘cloud’ and some of the interface conventions of the past won’t be necessary. I know it’s all coming. Still, tech companies do a notoriously poor job of smoothly introducing changes. Maybe this happens because they have their eyes so far into the future that they aren’t watching the present.

Apple, of late, has surprised me with a few questionable introductions. As someone who does user-experience work for a living, I get why they do the things they do from an “UX purists” standpoint. However, I’m curious if companies like Apple take into consideration (or even care) about brand perception as people adapt to new releases. Facebook has certainly tarnished its reputation by making its interface changes abrupt, disorienting and at times even questionable in terms of user privacy. Over time, I would think those repeated moments of frustration would color someone’s decision making process. True people still flock to Facebook but perhaps that’s because there’s an absence of viable competition. As to Apple, yes people still look to it as the vanguard of all things consumer gizmo, but I hear more and more rumblings among Apple faithful as to some discontent. Of late, I’ve been joining that chorus.

Take for example iTunes. I’ve had versions of iTunes from the beginning. I update regularly and I have to say, the latest version is decidedly more difficult to get used to. I expect an initial level of irritation with any update. That’s just the by-product of reorientation. But even now, weeks later, jumping from the store to my devices, populating playlists, transferring downloaded content to my devices, etc. feels less obvious. I find myself jumping back and forth from left to right trying to remember which button does what and where those playlists are hidden and how I add to them. I can see what they were going for. Maybe they’re even there from that purist’s perspective. I’ve had trouble adapting though. I have to believe I’m not the only one.

itunes-11

Very slick, but tell me again, how do I add songs to a playlist?

The removal of ‘Save As’ from Apple software as a result of OS “improvements” also confounds me. For many, many years people have been using Save As. In theory, if I am using Timemachine (the Apple OS backup software), it makes more sense to track versions by timestamp and to auto-save. This prevents data loss, etc. All good. Except that many people (like me) rename our files for different drafts as they are passed to others. The minute a document is shared the whole TimeMachine-as-auto-save-version-backup thing begins to fall apart a little for me.

Of mice and men.
No doubt today’s changes will someday seem as natural as the Mouse/Desktop construct does now. And it’s worth nothing that the Mouse/Desktop probably took some getting used to for programmers more accustom to typing in cryptic command lines.

However, the brilliance of the Mouse/Desktop was that it replicated something we were all intuitively familiar with from the physical world- pushing objects around on a physical space and using a pointed object to highlight or mark space. I believe that’s why touch screens were so easy to get used to as well. They were tactile changes that mirrored physical world cause-and-effect experiences.

Many of the enhancements to interfaces today are reductive. We’re removing scroll bars, buttons, and tools because a fundamental of UX theory, which is to remove the unnecessary. However, the reduction happening now is not accompanied by a more intuitive replacement. Worse, in some instances leaps are being made between devices. I understand removing scroll bars from an iPad but Safari does this on my laptop too, which when plugged into a monitor and used with an adjunct keyboard and mouse, is a little more of a nuisance.

Where the mouse eliminated the need for cryptic command lines and replaced them with a pointer we could manipulate similar to a prosthetic limb, now menu options simply disappear in favor of processes that happen in the background. ‘Save As’ was a conscious choice. TimeMachine happens “unconsciously”, so the user is detached from it. TimeMachine also assumes file indexing and naming responsibility which is perhaps a power I don’t want to give up because renaming files may have benefits, especially in version tracking across a shared userbase.

In UX discussions I often come back to the steering wheel in a car as a useful analogy. In the United States that steering wheel is usually roughly the same shape and always on the left side of the vehicle. Sure, we could move it right, change it’s form, make it a joystick, etc. in the name of making some new and novel. Doing so, however, creates friction with how people have spent the last decades learning to drive.

Could be migrate toward something radically different? Absolutely. Should we? Perhaps. But to do so, smaller, incremental changes should be introduced over time so that the higher order – the actual utility of the interface – is not so radically different at any one release, that it stymies attempts to extract usefulness from it. This of course is in conflict with the idea of releasing something new, novel and headline worthy – which is the goal of any tech company looking to make or keep a name for itself. What’s right for the user is often not what’s right for the marketing game. That’s unfortunate.

Apple, I think, has been stepping a little too far lately.  I hope they continue to sprint ahead and reinvent the basic mechanics of digital interaction. I’d just like it if, when they ask us to run along with them, they’d set a pace where we wouldn’t be slowed down by having to adapt to their leaps of intuition, nor would we be left behind because they sprinted too far too fast.

Bridging the gap between creativity and usability.

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For the creative person working in marketing and design, ‘be different’ is important. From day one, creatives are trained and usually rewarded for thinking outside the box, pushing limits and breaking new ground. As a result, when a creative person perceives a pattern in an industry, category, approach, etc. their natural reaction is to zag when others zig. In advertising this is often the difference between breaking through work and being lost in the noise.

The agenda of the user-experience designer is different. Someone tasked with managing usability needs to make sure the person engaging with their interface can quickly and easily navigate the system, accomplish their tasks and find their way to the next logical place. This has much to do with leveraging existing paradigms and conventions as appropriate. So where the creative person sees ‘different’ as an advantage. The UX designer sees it as a potential barrier to usability.

Much of the interface design work that goes into websites and apps falls on the shoulders of people who are classified as ‘creatives’. While a digitally native designer might snap to the needs of usability quicker, there is still an overwhelming urge among most creative people to substitute in the ‘new and different’ whenever possible. That could be in anything from the placement of navigation to the use of icons instead of words.

I recently stumbled upon a useful analogy for helping creative people understand where and how creativity and usability should meet and merge. I thought I would share it with you as you might find it helpful too.

My analogy is the automobile. There is all sorts of creativity in automobile design. From aesthetics, to the placement of cup holders, to the shape and position of taillights. However, every car manufactured has some common elements. A steering wheel on the left side is one (for cars in the U.S.). the gas pedal on the right and brake on the left, is another. The shape of those pedals (vertical vs. horizontal orientation) is yet another.

It’s fair to assume that car designers have entertained other replacements for the steering wheel. Joysticks, video-game like controllers, etc. And certainly, some modifications have been made (like adding buttons to the steering wheel for controlling the sound and climate systems). But by and large the steering wheel looks the same now as it did 20 years ago. That’s because the steering wheel is directly related to the utility of the car. If you can’t steer you can’t drive. And if every time you get into a new car, you need to learn to steer again there’d be many, many more accidents on the road.

In fact, when you think about it, if a car’s usability is compromised it can be immediately frustrating. Most of us have rented a car where the lights and windshield wipers are on different sides. Imagine you’re driving. In comes a flash rain shower. You quickly reach for the wipers and accidentally turn on your high beams. Think about what that does as you’re trying to keep your car in its lane and dealing with rapidly diminishing visibility. In a addition to frustrating, it’s also dangerous. Fortunately, digital design usability issues aren’t usually lethal (though they may lead to products being killed).

With web and app designs, it can be tempting to move the navigation or treat buttons in creative ways. Though one should exercise extreme caution in doing so as it can be the equivalent of swapping the wipers for the headlights on the steering column of a car.

Now, you could dig in here and call up the iPod as an example. The now iconic spinner wheel was a huge shift in interface. It was very different, very new and ultimately very successful.  That said, I have two thoughts on the spinner. One, Apple probably spent a small fortune testing usability before it released the product. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m guessing they did. Second, the spinner found its home in a whole new device without a prior paradigm to reference. MP3 players were far different from the mechanical needs of portable CD players. If you’re creating a new product category, the opportunity might arise for a complete break from convention. But if you’re designing for a device with a history – like computers and I would argue even by similarity, tablets (which still rely heavily on the visual concept of buttons) – you’ll likely get better usability by keeping critical aspects of the interface familiar.

By the way, the car analogy is also useful for clients. An agency’s clients often seek to be new and different just like their creative teams. Marketers know that sameness in advertising rarely lead to gains in marketshare. However, websites and apps are not really advertisements. Sure it helps a brand, but by the time someone is on your website or using your app, the goal has changed. No longer are you looking to ‘break through’ or ‘stand out’ in the advertising sense. The job instead is to deliver on a promise and experience. Good experiences can have a degree of novelty, true, but they also should be efficient and easy. They should feel satisfying and never be confusing. Navigating the experience should be quickly familiar even if the screens loaded are full of new information, ideas, games, videos, tools or whatever. This is precisely why designing a website or app is like designing a car. You’re getting into it to go somewhere and do something. Anything that makes that harder in turn makes the vehicle less useful, no matter how sexy it is on the surface.