Heck, we were born that way, weren’t we? If you think about it, pretty much everything else has to be learned. And I’m not talking about iPads and Photoshop here. What I’m talking about are spoons, and crayons, and stairs, and shoe laces.
One thing that can help learning is simplicity. One of my favorite slides in any presentation I do on usability basics is a comparison of the Google homepage with the train wreck that the Yahoo homepage eventually became. Searching the Web should not be rocket science. Rocket science should be rocket science. Everything else needs to be a heck of a lot simpler.
Another crucial factor is consistency. Know why? Inconsistency basically just makes things more complex. Say you’re designing an ecommerce checkout process. Why would you change where the next button appears from one page to another? Why would you say “next” on one page and “continue” on another? All of these things make users stop and think about what’s different, why it’s different, and why exactly you’re making them waste time figuring those things out.
A final thing to consider is modeling your new interface or interaction on something the user already knows and is familiar with. In the early days, this meant using something from the real, physical world. Designing an email system? Just use the fields from a typical, real-world memo – from, to, subject, cc. (Anyone know what “cc” stands for? Answer below.) Heck, just looking at the tool bar on the software I’m using to write this, I find folders, floppy disks, a paintbrush, and scissors (for cut and paste). These kinds of models were a big part of Don Norman’s early and ground-breaking book The Psychology of Everyday Things.
These days though, with more people familiar with the virtual world than the real one, modeling your system on such quaint things as desks, offices, book stores, and newspaper classifieds might not always work. And that’s where standards come in.
In the early days of the Web, there actually weren’t a lot of standards. Now, however, you break standards at your own risk. The user has already learned how to do certain basic things on plenty of other sites. Doing things differently on your site simply makes your UI inconsistent, which makes it more complex, which makes it less usable. (Yes, that does make you stand out, Mr. Art Director … but not really in a good way.) And, yes, the same thing is taking place for mobile as well.
No, none of us are designing the next nipple (though I have to admit, Google has come close). But there are some things we can do to make our systems and websites approach that simple ideal.
Don Norman (you weren’t expecting a nipple, were you?)
“cc”
stands for “carbon copy.” Before
photocopy machines, people made multiple copies of documents by using “carbon
paper.” According to Wikipedia:
“A sheet of carbon paper is placed between two sheets of paper and
the pressure applied by the writing implement (pen, pencil, typewriter or impact printer) to the top sheet causes pigment
from the carbon paper to make a similar mark on the copy. More than one copy
can be made by stacking several sheets with carbon paper between each pair.
Four or five copies is a practical limit. The top sheet is the original and
each of the additional sheets is called a carbon copy, from the use of the
carbon paper.”
Scary
stuff, huh?
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