UI and us

Normally I like to write positive stuff and I really love Uxmatters.. it’s a great site. BUT, the recent article PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience, from my perspective is pretty much everything that’s wrong with Help today. Of course, I’d love to know what you think of my opinion.

Bad Help

The article is like bad help. It’s too long. It’s too dry. It has no narrative, and it’s written for the kind of people that like to read manuals. I’ll admit it, I’m one of them, but I’m aware I’m the small minority. The pictures are boring. It has no characters, story, or SEX to it. And it’s text, text text. The lack of any comments [edit: some comments have now been added] on the article makes me question how many read the full thing.

A Cultural Heritage

Meet Rupert. Rupert is computer programmer and writes Help files for Automated Teacups Inc. Rupert loves to read long bits of text. When he’s looking for something, he clearly knows what it is he is searching for, and how to describe it in a text form. His mind can unravel trees structures, and disclosure-triangle based maps with ease.. in fact he finds it easy to remember large maps of where stuff is in his head. He also doesn’t mind jumping around between chunks of text, because he always knows how to get back to where he was due to this innate and learned ability. 

It is these skills which lead him, and those like him into the computer industry in the first place. And inside this environment, these particular skills have strengthened. 

Rupert doesn’t understand why people simply don’t READ what he WROTE! Pictures don’t excite him as much as text. He choses usage examples like computer hardware or servers. His Help documents wouldn’t ever use “favourite puppy database” as an example.

Rupert has done a wonderful job. Without these minds, computers would never have got created and optimized in the first place. Now it’s time for the next step, to optimize for ‘average’ humans.

“HELP” should, and could be…

• Somewhat wiki-like
• Searchable images and video. With actual people in it
• Entertaining to browse.. to find out things you didn’t know you were looking for
• Much more integrated with the application itself* 
• Text-chat enabled
• Easy to keep above all other apps
• Easy to subscribe to
• Vastly easier for the creator to update, even if video/image heavy

I’m sorry Mike, but your article is dangerous, because it instills a feeling that Help is “almost there”. It’s not. 

* The earlier Mac OS’s Help would draw a thick red pen around the buttons you needed to click when explaining a particular topic

[NOTE: oops, comments were off. Now back on. ]

Anyone who uses a Mac has probably used one of The Omni Group’s applications. William Van Hecke is the User Experience Lead at this well respected and long-lasting independent software House, and I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to email interview him on the processes of design at Omni.
Hi William, thanks for taking the time to voice your thoughts on UI and us.

Congratulations on the recent Apple Design Award for OmniFocus. With this one adding to four previous ADA’s, what is it about the Omni Group that generates such award-winning software?

It’s a concoction of pretty much every variable about Omni, from the family atmosphere around the office, to the long years of engineering and design experience, to the way employees from every department feel ownership of the products. We just can’t get enough of making stuff, and making stuff better. When we look for new people, we demand that in addition to their expertise, they also bring a personality we actually want to eat lunch and dinner with every day.

William enjoys a nice can of “Smap!”

How do you approach designing User Interactions and interface in general? Could you describe your workflow?

Most products start with a list of features, ranging in concreteness from “we need a badge with the due item count” to “you shouldn’t need to know GTD in order to use this app”. If we’re working on a new version of an existing app, many of the features are born of our enormous bug-tracking database, where we file every bit of customer feedback that comes in. But we have to agree with a request before we incorporate it, no matter how popular it is. Our own internal zeitgeist is the main determiner of where the product goes, because nobody can do their best work on something they’re not really interested in. (more…)

I like these 3d isometric maps. Found via a post on the excellent information aesthetics.

This great TED talk introduces the idea that we don’t see what we think we do. Watch the first five minutes, and do what the magician says, and I’m sure, like me, you’ll find yourself fooled.

The idea that someone can be fooled is not new, of course. Magicians and all form of artists (especially the con variety) have been doing it for centuries. But the more I read, the more I realize that we’ve got a pretty weak grip on reality anyway. 

The Study of Attention

If you’ve ever read into a little coginitive science, you would have come across the following experiment: A person is told to watch a video where a number of people are passing basketballs between one another. The experimentee is told to count the number of passes. Midway in the video though, a man in a gorilla suit walks slowly across the middle of the scene. Amazingly, when asked about this later, most people say they didn’t see anything strange in the video. They literally didn’t see the gorilla because their focus was so directed!

This, and other wonderful experiments on attention can be found at the Visual Cognition Lab in the University of Illinois, including, this amazing “Construction worker” experiment:

You can see the original footage on the , construction worker Visual Cognition Lab page but I’ve made a storyboard with Comic Life with some screen grabs to explain what happens. This video is copyright Viscog Productions.
 

 
This is an astounding study. The brain is very keen to fill in the gaps, or warp our sensory input to match what we believe to be true. If you want to test yourself, try the ‘Gradual changes to scenes’ examples. Personally I didn’t see many of the changes, and if I did, I only had a rough sense of what changed, and was often wrong.

The Dance Music Display
Before getting into the software world, I was working at a large CD store. There were two levels, with Dance Music on the upstairs level. A massive neon sign pointed along the wall and up besides the escalator to the Dance Music section. But many people would still come to the counter on the lower level and ask if the store stocked Dance Music. “Can’t they read??!” we’d wonder. Then one day, the Dance Music guy from upstairs put a display of a few select titles on a shelf on the lower level. In between the select Dance Music CDs on the display were empty CD cases with the text “More Dance Music Upstairs”.

It was then I realized: People were literally looking for Dance Music, not the indications to it. They were in “find the right CD” mode, not “read signs” mode.

Unread Skitch Tips
In our Skitch application, keeping the interface clean meant many of the advanced features required you to hold down the Shift/Command/Option key. As a helpful reminder, we floated a little tip bezel above the main Skitch window.

Seeing What You’re Looking For

But you guessed it; nobody reads that. Why? Probably for the same reason. They’re looking for something they expect to be in a certain form (probably an icon). As a result, they literally cannot the text.

I’ve seen some great eye-tracking data from the respected Nielsen Norman Group for this. ‘Heat Maps’, an accumulation of eye-tracking data, show that many people literally don’t see the graphical ads on web sites. Even when the ads provided the answer to the experimentee’s task, eg “Find the lowest price Skiing holiday on the website”.

How to Make a UI Dissapear

Good UI design is about making the UI mirror the users mental model of the user. But the transmission from the UI to the user is not so clear, linear or instant. And sometimes you don’t want the user to incur the cost of noticing ever-changing states.

For example; we’re constantly inundated with email, IM, twitter notifications and the like. But the ‘Gradual changes to scenes’ example shows us that changes over a period of 15 seconds can go un-noticed, so it’s possible to change the state of something without triggering our attention.

Instead of popping up a notification, or adding a badge instantly, the UI could slowly fade in a change over 15 seconds. This could be applied across many areas of User Interfaces. And I’d personally love a computer experience which emphasized ‘flow’ and gradual, constant change. No longer would every little change pull your attention away from an important task. Instead, those Mail notifications, system messages and the like could gently change without you noticing, until you decided you wanted to actually look.

SIDENOTE: I actually turn off Mail.app notifications, and simply un-Hide Mail when I want to check for mail. I’m sure Merlin Mann would approve.
 

This is a great visual example of using a specific physical perspective in design. German designer, Axel Peemöller has a very cool website portfolio — definitely worth a look. This Melbourne carpark has signs painted with text only readible clearly from the entry/exit it’s aimed for. See the full set of photos here.