Rules of Usability: Unix

Eric Steven Raymond and Rob W. Landley have written an intriguing, free online book called The Art of Unix Usability. Although the site has been receiving more than its fair share of attention over the past 24 hours, the chapter titled Rules of Usability is worth a second, third, and fourth look. Roll the highlight film:

Rule of Bliss: Allow your users the luxury of ignorance.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify. Look for features that cost more in interface complexity than they're worth and remove them."

Rule of Distractions: Allow your users the luxury of inattention.
"One good test for an interface design is, therefore: can it be worked comfortably while the user is eating a sandwich, or driving a car, or using a cellphone?"

Rule of Flow: Allow your users the luxury of attention.
"Well-designed interfaces do not clamor for attention or advertise their own cleverness . . . They support concentration and creativity by getting out of the way."

Rule of Documentation: Documentation is an admission of failure.
"The best user interfaces are so transparent and discoverable that they don't require documentation at all. "

Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
"If you're writing a calculator program, '+' should always mean addition! . . . The best interface designs match a pre-existing model in the minds of their user populations."

Rule of Transparency: Every bit of program state that the user has to reason about should be manifest in the interface.
"Mindspace is much more scarce and precious than screen space . . . Interface design is not a game to be won by claiming those slots [the 7+-2 slots in short-term memory; see below] -- to the contrary, you've done your job best when the user is freed to allocate them himself."

Rule of Modelessness: The interface's response to user actions should be consistent and never depend on a hidden state.
"It has been widely understood that modes are a bad idea . . . A computing system ideally designed for human use would have one single set of gestures and commands that are uniformly applicable and have consistent meanings across its entire scope."

Rule of Seven: Users can hold at most 7+-2 things at once in working storage.
"While users may be able to visually recognize more than seven controls, actually using them will involve refreshing short-term memory with retrieved knowledge about them."

Rule of Confirmation: Every confirmation prompt should be a surprise.
" . . . It is very bad practice to have confirmation prompts for which the normal answer is 'Yes, proceed onwards'. Thus, routine confirmation prompts are a bad idea."

Rule of Failure: All failures should be lessons in how not to fail.
"A special hell awaits the designers of programs whose response to errors is a message or popup giving a hex code, or one cryptic line that simply says 'An error occurred . . . ' . . . In a well-designed UI, all failures are informative. There are no brick walls; the user always has a place to go next and learn more about the failure and how to recover from it."

Rule of Automation: Never ask the user for any information that you can autodetect, copy, or deduce.
"Every time you require a human user to tell a computer things that it already knows or can deduce, you are making a human serve the machine."

Rule of Defaults: Choose safe defaults, apply them unobtrusively, and let them be overridden if necessary.
"Autodetection can become a problem if the computer guesses wrong and there is no way to override the guess."

Rule of Respect: Never mistake keeping things simple for dumbing them down.
"It is misguided and lazy to attack simplifications of an interface by claiming that they necessarily dumb it down. The test for a good simplification shoudl always be the same -- whether or not it makes the user experience better -- and that test shoudl be checked with real users."

Rule of Predictability: Predictability is more important that prettiness.
"You don't get usability from mere prettiness. Beware of pushing pixels around too much."

Rule of Reality: The interface isn't finished till the end-user testing is done.
"Far too many programmers who would never consider shipping a library without a test suite are somehow willing to ship programs that feature an interactive UI without testing them on real users . . . Go out and talk to people who are likely to use the thing. Slap together a quick prototype and get them to complain about it at length. Get a piece of paper and ask them to draw the interface they want with a pencil."

Can Bad Design be Good Design?

First off, let's look at the basis for this article.

Three Truths about Design

1. Design has a purpose
2. The only qualification for a good design is to meet that purpose
3. Everything else is superfluous

What does this mean?

If a design meets its purpose, it can assault your eyes all day long and still be good design.

Why do I bring this up?

I was watching TV the other day when one of the Viagra commercials came on. I have always though they were ridiculous. I have always thought they were poorly done. In fact, I feel the same way about most medical commercials. Dr. ImAPaidActor hasn't convinced me to take my vitamins, let alone make an appointment to find out if mystery medicine #5 is "right for me."

So that means the commercials are poorly designed, right? Right.

Wrong. The truth is that Viagra doesn't think of me AT ALL when they create a commercial. They don't care about me. I am not their target customer. They don't care what I think of that stuffy doctor, or the middle-aged parents having a dance party in their kitchen (although, to be fair, I hope that I am having kitchen dance parties in thirty years).



So at this point, I have to concede something - they know their target audience much better than I do. Apparently. people who are pro Viagra are also pro awkward dancing. I shouldn't simplify it so much, but the point is still there.

What's the Point?

Looking at design from this perspective, don't we have to reconsider for a moment exactly what we define "good design" and "bad design" to be? Most of the design-savvy people I know are in their 20s and 30s. So while the right grunge font may catch my eye, it might make my grandparents change the channel. Think about the following questions:

• Is this website that uses Comic Sans targetting 5th graders?
• Is this midi background music targeting elementary music teachers?
• Is this design that is based on a neon color palette targeting Vegas strippers?

You may be saying, " . . . but wait, WAIT! Those things are still bad design!" And the truth is, yes, I die just a tad every time I see something of that sort. But I can also tell you that my mother loves midi music sites, and my 5th grade self (rocking sweat pants and pogs) thought that Comic Sans was the coolest font ever.

To me, it is bad design. But if the design serves its purpose, doesn't that qualify it for good design? Can't bad design be good design?

Unclickable "Buttons"

The Site

Last week, I was given the link to a new city guide website: PlanetEye

The homepage looks wonderful. It is easy to navigate, interactive, and eye-catching. Over on the right side of the screen, there are three buttons labeled discover, plan, and share. They are three distinct colors, and even with all the other eye-candy around the screen, I am drawn to click them. But instead of jumping right into those options, I first want to try searching for a city I know well. Regardless, I figure that I might as well take a look at the basic use-case. I hop over to the search area (inviting, and easy to find), type in "Boston," and am immediately taken to a map of Boston. Cool. I am beginning to like this place. But now back to those colored buttons.

Share looks like a good place to start. I am interested in the Web 2.0 features this site has to offer.

A screenshot highlighting those colored buttons

Uh-Oh

click. click. clickclickclickcLickcLicKCLickCLiCKCLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

Nothing. It turns out that those "buttons" aren't buttons at all. They are just informational boxes. This shouldn't be a big deal. It really shouldn't. But it drives me crazy. Why would you make those boxes look like that if I can't click them? Now, all I want to do is look at the Share options. But where do I do that?

Maybe you think I'm making something out of nothing. The problem is that a silly misunderstanding like a button that isn't really a button becomes a barrier to the user. It is annoying. And as ridiculous as it sounds, every time I visit PlanetEye, I want to click those "buttons." Every. Single. Time. When internet users have the same attention span as a caffeinated 5th grader in Chuckie Cheese's, creating a fake door can make them visit a different house.

The Solution

The worst part it? A fix is easy. Looking around the site, I realized what it was that convinced me a wall was a door. Everything clickable on the front page is colorful, with hard, defined edges (pictures, real buttons, etc.). Everything that isn't clickable is contained in soft, grey lines, generally surrounded by white space.

I would simply make white the dominant color of those containers, with blue, green, and brownish being secondary. I might even soften those edges just a tad.

"But it looks good the way it is now," you might say. And you could very well be right. But not by much. The new design would still look nice, fit in with the theme of the page, and not make me angry.

And let's be honest. Keeping me happy is what this is all about.

Please PowerPoint Responsibly

Being a bit of a PowerPoint perfectionist, I enjoyed stumbling across a blog entry from a Master's student at the School of Informatics at Indiana University: PowerPoint: How it should and should NOT be used.

I'll save my presentation rantings and ravings for later postings, but I think you'll particularly enjoy the second video in the entry. It should be mandatory viewing for anyone who speaks.