Via Schneier on Security, in two tests, ostensible food-additives were rated as more novel and dangerous when their names were harder to pronounce. In another test, amusement park rides were rated as more thrilling, but more sickening, when their names were harder to pronounce.
Here’s a link to the abstract, but I can’t figure out how to find the real article.
One of the oldest canards in the interface business is the one that says “Maximizing functionality and maintaining simplicity work against each other in the interface” (Microsoft 1995, p.8). What is true is that adding ad hoc features works against simplicity. But that’s just bad design. It is often, but not always, possible to increase functionality without increasing difficulty at a greater rate. Often, added functionality can be had without any added interface complexity; note the difference between interface complexity and task complexity. If the added functionality unifies what had previously been disparate features, the interface can get simpler.
— Jeff Raskin, The Humane Interface
Examples of this are the exception, not the rule. Usually, more features means more complexity.
The best example I can think of is Coda, an award-winning web development IDE.
text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal + books + more = whoah.
The story of Coda.
So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, adjusting SQL in a Terminal, using a CSS editor and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we declared. “And much cooler.”
(To really get a sense of Coda you should check out the website, or try it for free).
Even though Coda’s interface is more complicated because it does more then just edit code, it simplifies the task of web-design, by unifying tasks that used to be done in different applications with different interfaces.
What other examples of things becoming simpler through added functionality can you think of? Please share in the comments below.
Panic did some experimentation … a little over a year ago, when they released Candy Bar 3.1 They have a phone-home system for serial numbers — not for any sort of Adobe- or Microsoft-style “activation” scheme, but simply to check whether a serial number is valid or known to be circulating on bootleg message boards and forums. They experimented with different dialog boxes that appeared when a user entered a known-to-be-pirated serial number. One message was staid and serious (“Microsoft-style”, in Cabel Sasser’s words), along the lines of “It appears someone gave you an invalid serial number…”; the other two messages were more personal, along the lines of “Please don’t pirate Candy Bar. We’re a small company making software for you, and software sales are what keep our company going.”
They got better results with the more personal messages — about 10 percent of would-be-bootleggers presented with those dialogs clicked the button and immediately bought a legitimate license for the app. But even the staid, impersonal message had a 5 percent sell-through rate — far higher than Panic expected.
…the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart’s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn’t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system’s powerful, language-size command structure? It’s an interesting argument when you think about it that way, but it ultimately doomed his design to obscurity, while his proteges who left for Xerox PARC and designed a system people could learn to use in a hour went on to change the world. Frictionless user experience is paramount, engineering concerns are secondary.
The title this post is something I’ve been saying as part of my personal statement on hirevincent.com for years.
I’ve finally found an example of, someone intentionally typing “ducking” on their iPhone,
Plotting routes to meetings based on who I’m currently ducking. It’s good for exercise. Also that time iPhone was correct- I meant ducking.
Obviously we can’t have a spellchecker suggesting profanity. But is it really so wrong to just leave it alone? Can we trust that if someone says something that strongly they really meant it?
Word 2008 seems to try, bless it’s heart. It won’t suggest or correct, “Mike Lee” (at least when it’s written as two words).
But it still can’t stand one of the heavy seven (original MP3). Word gives it the scarlet underline. That strikes me as odd. I wish I knew the story behind it. Is it actually a dangerously common typo? Is it statistically more taboo? Did someone just make a Puritan judgement call, and decide people wanted to be corrected for writing it? (UPDATE 2009-11-18: apparently it is the worst swear word in the World, at least according to that cute story.)
Ask yourself, are obscenity filters a Bad Idea, or an Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?
Roughly 10% of men are color blind to some degree. You need to be sure your interfaces are accessible to them. (Unless you are designing exclusively for women I suppose, since women are about 20x less likely to be color blind.)
Sim Daltonism is the best way to test an interface on Mac OS X I’ve seen.
Here is a web-based colorblindness simulator. Here is another. Personally I prefer a native program though. It’s faster and more versatile.
If you are curious, you can test yourself for colorblindness. I have no idea how accurate that test is, but since different displays and operating systems usually show colors differently I’d be a little skeptical.
ADDITION 2009-10-11: WeAreColorBlind.com is a website dedicated to design patterns for the colorblind.
Assumed-And is the way Google does it, with the more search terms added, the narrower the results. The other way around can be argued in the abstract, but your customers are not living in the abstract. The world has voted, and Assumed-And is the way it is. Having additional terms widen, rather than narrow, the scope confuses people in the extreme. They will leave you and find a site with a search function that “works.” This blunder alone could put a company out of business.
Learning happens when attention is focused. …
If you don’t have a good theory of learning, then you can still get it to happen by helping the person focus. One of the ways you can help a person focus is by removing interference.
–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.
Point of view is worth 80 IQ points … it’s not logic that is powerful. Logic is actually a weak method because it depends on fragile chains of inference. And people have used logic throughout history but mostly in inappropriate context.
There’s nothing illogical about the way the alchemists did things, it was that they were in a context where there logic couldn’t do much. so it’s this notion that the context is powerful, and if you want to be able to be good at solving problems and acting much smarter then you are then you have to find the context that will do the thinking for you.
Most computer scientists know this because it goes under another heading “choose the appropriate data structure before you start tinkering around with the algorithm”. If you choose the right data structure it will have most of the result computed almost automatically as part of its inherent structure.
–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.
There are many related anecdotes about solving the right problem.
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