Just ran into this the other day. Basically, some of my designers wanted to combine some features on a stock screener, a page where you can enter multiple search criteria to find a stock you might be interested in purchasing.
In particular, they wanted to combine the search fields with x’s, to remove any particular criteria from the search. Before, we had made that a little bit more explicit with pills above the search results table to indicate the user’s search criteria. Their argument was that the pills had cluttered up the screen.
I saluted their efforts, but brought up the idea that, though they had saved some space, they might have also made things more difficult to figure out. Will users see the x? Will they understand what it does? Will they get what is basically is now a modes issue? Norman goes on to say that “simple appearance can make control more difficult, more arbitrary, require memorization, and be subject to multiple forms of error.”
I actually see this quite a bit. Another example is hiding controls – e.g., only showing them when the user mouses over them. Very subtle, minimal design is another favorite of designers.
For the latter, I lay a lot of the blame on the Metro design style. That style makes quite a bit of the UI rather implicit. Can I click on this? Is this a header or a link? What does that icon mean? Is this supposed to be a tab? What happens if I mouse over here? To designers, though, it all just looks “sleek,” “elegant,” and “gorgeous.”
Whatever they happen to be coming up with, the designers I work with never quite seem to get my argument. That’s kind of ironic, as they love to talk about the idea of “affordance” (I think they may have picked that up from me). Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure they make the connection between the “clunky” things they are so busy getting rid of and the affordance that those things actually provide.
