08 Feb 2007 1326H

Barry Schwartz, Jenifer Tidwell, and what they taught me about IxD today

I have two learnings to pass on about User Interface Design today. They’re so important I even init-capped User Interface Design.

The first comes from Barry Schwartz’s book on satisfaction, choice, and consumer behavior, The Paradox of Choice. In it, he talks about opportunity costs, which the Economist succinctly describes as, “the true cost of something [being] what you give up to get it.” This cost causes you to lose utility, often significantly. For instance, silly example here: you can choose to be an adjunct faculty member in a non-tenure track position for 10 years, or you can be a user experience professional. You can make a pretty good living, but the opportunity cost, “the road not taken” is, you don’t get to enjoy the “life of the mind” — publishing pergatory, tenure battles, lazy disinterested undergrad students, having to constantly justify one’s taking up an FTE among petty departmental rivals and overlords, and . . . gee. Sounds like a pretty good tradeoff to me. . . ;-)

Likewise, what Schwartz implies, and which we, the royal we, take away from his work, is that there is such a thing as user interface opportunity costs. If the costs are too high for a user confronting our interface design, either by being bombarded by choice, or by perceived difficulty level, the user will simply walk away. But, perversely, the user is attracted to sites with lots of choices.

The more I read Schwartz, the more I am thinking that user choices and satisfaction are really separate, though connected issues. But Schwartz’ crusade is not about creating ever better user interface designs but in helping maximizers like myself recognize our problems for what they are and adopt satisficing methods, so we can enjoy life more fully. More on his shtuff lata.

Next, in the opening movements of her fantastic interaction design pattern book, Designing Interfaces, Jenifer (yes, with one n) Tidwell describes some basic user behavior patterns that help shape interfaces, and these patterns have objectives or goals attached to them:

Safe Exploration: “Let me explore without getting lost or getting into trouble.”
Instant Gratification: “This is good enough. I don’t want to spend more time learning to do it better.”
Changes in Midstream: “I changed my mind about what I was doing.”
Deferred Choices: “I don’t want to answer that now; just let me finish!”
Incremental Construction: “Let me change this. That doesn’t look right; let me change it again. That’s better.”
Habituation: “That gesture works everywhere else; why doesn’t it work here, too?”
Spatial Memory: “I swear that button was here a minute ago. Where did it go?”
Prospective Memory: “I’m putting this here to remind myself to deal with it later.”
Streamlined Repetition: “I have to repeat this how many times?”
Keyboard Only: “Please don’t make me use the mouse.”
Other People’s Advice: “What did everyone else say about this?”

I think this is a great set of heuristics to guide evaluations of interfaces. In fact, each one of these heuristics can be rated on a scale, 1-10, or, as I like to use, pass/fail if you like to be severe, and used as a way to identify and rank user interface issues during testing as well as design. Obviously, some things do not apply, but once we attach numbers to the heuristic eval, we have a way to attack the most common UI problems on a site.

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