2009-01-08
About Usability
Sami Haahtinen wrote a nice post about usability. I do mostly agree with him, except for one little thing:
A few years back, I noticed that I often started as a kind of “Joe User” with new applications, and often even stayed that way, often wishing that the UI of that application was simpler or at least made it more obvious which options are important and which I could most likely keep at their defaults.
Yet I am a system administrator and programmer/developer, so most people would probably consider me as an advanced user by default (wether that is correct in any given context or not, for example I still don’t really grok GIMP).
Also I did have quite a lot of contact with users that have very little experience, knowledge and interest in computers and software and only use them to achive certain goals.
Anyway, I’m quite sure most readers of this blog are aware that Linus Torvalds once complained about the Gnome printing dialog being simplified way too much. And at that time, I had to agree (note that I didn’t check out Gnome again since those days, at least 2 years ago).
What I really wonder (especially since I realized this in some of my own applications) is why it is so hard for developers to add some additional checkbox or button that enables/disables advanced options. For example, let’s take an applications printing dialog. By default, it would only allow the selection of a printer, orientation (if sensible) and (if the selected printer supports more than one) the paper size. Now advanced options might include duplex printing (automatic or manual), printing mutliple pages on a single sheet of paper, printing in grey on color printers,…
These options might be of use to anyone, but would most likely confuse beginners. So what I did in most of my little application was to just show the basic options and add an “advanced options” button which provided access to additional functionality which was not normally needed.
As for the issue with firefox updates mentioned by Sami: I don’t think it is a problem that firefox asks what to do with extensions. For one, it only lists extensions which are installed but claim not to support the new version of firefox. Second, practically everyone I know of who uses any extension can be considered to be an advanced user. And third: The dialog is pretty straightforward about what it is asking and when I once hit it while a (“dumb user”) friend was sitting with me, he understood what it was about quite easily (I didn’t explain the dialog, just what extensions were).
So my idea of a good UI is:
As simple as possible for beginning users, but allow advanced users to get to the details (“Details” or “Advanced options” buttons/checkboxes/dialogs).
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Joe Buck said,
January 8, 2009 at 18:39 UTC (+0000)
So, why is full-duplex printing an “advanced option”? Using a label like “advanced” for such a thing will just tend to intimidate the new user away from the very choice she or he must make to do what needs to be done.
Peng’s links for Thursday, 8 January « I’m Just an Avatar said,
January 8, 2009 at 20:50 UTC (+0000)
[...] Muller: About Usability. Another resident of Planet Debian has a great post that I think you guys should read. Sven had [...]
IanM said,
January 9, 2009 at 00:31 UTC (+0000)
At last, someone else in the Linux community who finds the GIMP too much. And I have been using Linux since 1997 and work as an analyst programmer.
I like my UIs simple too, with the option to switch on more features if I need them AND understand them. I loathe interfaces that throw everything at me at once, leaving me overwhelmed by choice and giving me no clue where to start or how to do the simple things.
Keep the simple things simple, and let the complicated things be possible – that is good design.
By the way, maybe “More options” is a better prompt than “Advanced options”.
sven said,
January 9, 2009 at 07:58 UTC (+0000)
Come on, that was just an EXAMPLE. Something simple to illustrate what I was talking about:
Do not disable a feature because you think it is too complicate for the average user, but instead hide it by default, giving an access path for those that want to use that feature.
By all means, if you think “advanced options” is the wrong term, use “more options” instead, or use even both: a “more options” for anything you deem to complicated for the beginner, but not too complicated for average users, while showing an “advanced options” button with the additional options revealed by “more options” allows to select debugging and really advanced options.