Sometimes Cool-Looking is Hard to Use
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DarkWyrm's Haiku Site: Sometimes Cool-Looking is Hard to Use |
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One thing that has struck me since the inception of the Haiku project is just how good BeOS' user interface is, borrowing from the other Big Three - Unix, Windows, and Mac OS. Glass Elevator has prompted a number of people to come up with concept screenshots of what would be a cool user interface for R2 to possess. Few people truly understand what a good interface is and tend to make judgement calls with the attitude of an expert without the expertise of an expert. When concept screnshots are put up for comments, they often prompt nitpicking over small details like "I don't like the drop shadows on the scrollbars." I've discovered through a lot of reading and observing that something which looks cool isn't always what is in the best interest of the user and his productivity, which is really what most aspects of interface design are all about.
Software companies make many promises - easier to use, more, better, faster, and a host of others. In theory, their products should provide a user the means to work more efficiently. When a deadline is tight or when under pressure, however, the user often finds himself wasting time "fighting with the computer" or going an entirely different route to arrive at a solution. An example might be when a college student needs to print out labels for a campus group but can't remember how to set it up and isn't quite sure how to find the information on how to do so. Not wanting to go through the effort of asking possibly more than one person to find out, the student ends up hand copying names and addresses, taking ten times longer than it would have by printing them on a printer in the computer lab. Why are computers difficult to make them do what we want? Generally because software developers spend little time on ensuring they have designed their products well.
Most Windows users have become so accustomed to the badgering we receive from Microsoft that we tend to forgetfully assume that there are better ways to work out there. An excellent editorial I read recently referred to the children's show Blue's Clues. For those not in the know, it is very popular in the US, partly because of research on what keeps children's attention. In the article is a quote from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point which explains it all: "Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused." It doesn't change when they grow up, either. Adults tune out when too much effort is required to understand a subject, which would explain why a general public library would likely find more usage of the book "Physics for Morons" than another which required some knowledge of calculus to understand.
Badly designed software is the same way. The only time I know a user will tolerate bad software is when he/she has no other choice. While Windows has its good points, it also has a long list of bad ones. The same could be said of Mac OS, Linux, or even our beloved BeOS. I suspect that the list of bad points in BeOS would be minor ones, but considering that I use it 95% of the time, I wouldn't be able to say what they are - one could say that I am too close to the window glass to see the spots on it.
Anthropology is, in short, the study of how people live. This would include studying how people work. If a program is to make the user's job easier (that *is* our job, right?) then we as a developer community (coders and non-coders alike) must study how the user works using BeOS and how a user *should* work using BeOS for a particular task. A part of Extreme Programming is the User Story, where the customer writes about three somewhat general sentences about the needs of a theoretical user. By studying what the user needs to do, one can begin to understand what will be necessary to accomplish the task quickly and with the least amount of thought given to the question, "How do I make the computer do this?"
Designing a UI is easy. Designing a good UI is not, and it is also not a small task. It requires going far beyond making a mock screenshot of what it should look like. This is not to say that our new UI should not look good nor does this imply that making concept screenshots is useless and/or unnecessary. To quote a conversation I once had with Guillaume Maillard (of BlueEyedOS), "The best software doesn't need a manual." Cool isn't always usable, but usable never goes out of fashion.
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