Many philosophers over the centuries
have asked: "what makes bad user interface design?" Oh
the arguments that have raged over that apparently simple question.
Is it all inspiration, accident or genius that leads to bad user
interface design? Are there principles we can deduce to help new and inexperienced designers write bad user interface code, maybe even
dreadful user interface code?
I believe that the answer is yes, we
can help people design and write bad user interface code, code that
demeans the user, insults the user, makes their life worse, and makes
their work impossible or nearly so. True inspiration may be beyond
our capability to teach, true genius may break these principles we
write down here, but for the great majority we can deduce principles
that can act as guidelines for a truly bad user interface or "user
experience" as we say.
We will take the case study approach as
pioneered by Harvard Business School and from these case studies try
to create principles to apply to new situations.
I recently sat down to learn GIMP, the
Gnu Image Processing program, and was thrilled by its bad user
interface ideas. From these I derived some principles and will then
discuss how GIMP achieves these worthwhile goals.
Principle #1: Make a bad first impression.
If you can make a bad first
impression, then you may even be able to make the user give up entirely. But how, specifically, can
one make a bad first impression?
Principle #2: Increase frustration by focusing on what the beginning user has
to do and make that more difficult
In other words, concentrate your bad
design into those areas that the beginner has to work through, it is less important to inconvenience
the advanced user as they are far fewer in number and have more capability and skills to work through
your stupidity.
Principle #3: Use a GUI design or principle from a similar program that the beginner almost certainly knows but give it a
completely different meaning, and actually hide something important
that the user needs to do under that
category.
Our third principle here is a particularly
nasty one. It solves several problems at once, it confuses the
user, and makes them less confident that they bring skills to your
program that will be useful.
Let us examine how GIMP achieves these three principles in a truly elegant manner. What is the first
thing a beginner of a "paint" program might wish to do? Well I would argue that finding a paint brush and setting a color is
pretty much right at the top of the list for a beginning user. What
Gimp does for this is to make it ok to find a paint brush, although
there is some good confusion there, but then it completely makes it
inscrutable to choose a color. How does it do this? It does this by hiding the pick-a-color function under a glyph that means something else entirely in Photoshop.
Then ask yourself how many new users
of Gimp will have been exposed to Photoshop? I would argue that at
least 80% of any user of Gimp will have learned at least something of
Photoshop and the percentage may well be higher. Then what could be
more devious and self-defeating than to hide "pick a color"
under a graphic that has nothing to do with picking a color from Photoshop? And that is exactly what they do. In Gimp, pick a color
is carefully hidden under the following icon:
which means of course to exchange a
foreground color with a background color in Photoshop and has nothing
to do, actually with choosing a color.
What genius ! What mad genius ! What
a clever and nasty person whoever did this must be !!
No one would ever think to look under
switch fg/bg color, and they have to look up how to pick color in
Gimp on the internet (of course there is no online documentation for
Gimp) and eventually they find it, but not after many minutes or even
hours of frustration and hairpulling.
So our first case study suggests: find
something a beginner certainly has to do, and hide it in a place he
will explicitly not look for it based on previous experience.
In future posts we will examine other examples of genius bad user interface design.
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