Confessions of a User Experience Junkie

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here (or in any of the other public forums for my thoughts on UE) before, but I have this general skepticism towards many of the so-called luminaries in my field. There’s the academic HCI experts whose research is of little use outside of their ivory towers, the web journalists who know exactly what they want in an interface and assume it’s the best thing for everybody… and then there’s the folks who did good work twenty years ago but have apparently lost their way since.

One of these made waves in the Mac community this past week… revered HI commentator Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini (founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group) wrote up a review of Mac OS X 10.3 and its interface, after being largely silent on OS X for the past few years. Despite his credentials , Tog’s column reads little differently from the many rants we’ve seen in various online forums and blogs — the ones from longtime Mac “power users” who see any and every change from the OS 9 environment as a crippling blow to everyone’s productivity. He’s got a few good points, but it’s looking like he’s lost his edge and feels the need to resort to sensationalism. There’s an awful lot to criticize about this article — indeed, folks are already ripping it to shreds in some forums — but I’d like to focus on one issue that’s been largely overlooked.

If Tog’s still an expert on anything, it’s the subfield of human interface study that relates to user efficiency; that is, how to optimize a software design so that the user can accomplish the most tasks with the fewest actions in the shortest amount of time. He recognizes that Exposé is a great step forward in this area, and notes the minor time-wasters associated with it (if you use “hot corners”, you have to be careful not to accidentally hit a corner; a problem which could be solved with a tiny delay), and points out several issues of low information density and user slowdowns in the Finder and Dock.

The problem with this argument is that efficiency alone doesn’t make for a good user experience. After all, seasoned Unix command-line jockeys are well known for their ability to accomplish with a few arcane gestures over the keyboard what point-and-click laymen can take a whole day to work though. The whole point of graphical user interfaces is that they balance efficiency with intuitiveness. An intuitive interface may make some tasks take longer to complete than they could in an interface designed for maximum efficiency, but you can learn it on the spot instead of having to take time digging through documentation.

Yes, the Dock takes up more screen space than the OS 9 Apple Menu and Application Menu did. But what we lose in efficiency we make up for in usability: no longer are new users confounded by applications which remain running with no windows open, for example. In fact, the usability advantages of the Dock are making many users more efficient and productive than they were on OS 9 — making favorite applications easily accessible no longer requires an understanding of aliases and a complicated procedure for setting up an hierarchic Apple menu or set of tabbed Finder windows full of them. Also, since the Dock merges these two OS 9 interface elements, users need not concern themselves as much with whether an application is running when they go to activate it.

The best interface designs strive to find a balance between being efficient and being intuitive. Sometimes the one has to be sacrificed for the other, but often, with a lot of work, some inspiration, and maybe a little luck, it’s possible to arrive at a solution that maximizes both.

Yeah… so I haven’t posted in a while, huh? How I managed to be deprived of opportunities and/or motivation to write in this journal for the last six months or so is a long story, perhaps for another time. Suffice to say that my professional and personal lives are now (finally) back in a state that I actually feel like writing about UE stuff when I have time to, so this probably won’t be the last entry for another six months.

In other news… I got a new cellphone last month, and a new PowerBook a couple weeks ago. Bluetooth is officially the Coolest Geek Toy Ever, especially when Salling Clicker is involved. Thus far, there’s been a lot of noise in the academic HCI community over “attentive user interfaces” but not a lot of good real-world implementations; but now, I’ve quickly made the transition to living with a computer that (thanks to a wireless connection to the phone in my pocket) knows when I’m present and can react accordingly. In fact, I’m sometimes rather annoyed when other parts of my computing experience can’t be usefully presence-aware. (More on that another time.)

Anywho, today I threw together a Clicker script for iPhoto 4… going through hundreds of kitten photos to mark the cutest ones and delete the blurry ones is so much more comfortable when we can do it while relaxing on the couch instead of leaning over the keyboard. It’s a keypad script designed for the Sony Ericsson T608/T610/T616, but it should be easy to translate to other devices as well. Here it is in case you might find it useful.