The user interface is important. It is the ambassador for your system, your advertisement, your customer service rep. So you need to make sure it’s customer-friendly. Put simply, your system needs to do what people expect it to do. When I click on a link with a roll-over effect, it will take me to a different page. When I click on a button, it should trigger an action. So we stick to these standards, even if they’re not the best usability-wise, because we are creatures of habit and even little changes hurt.
Here’s an example
When you’re searching on most sites, you need to type in your search text, click on ‘Search’ and wait for the page to reload. We thought we could improve this with ‘in-place searching’. As this probably doesn’t mean much to anyone (as we just made this phrase up), let me explain:
I want to be able to search the site from any page, at any time – and I don’t want to lose my bearings. So I go to the obligatory search box at the top right hand part of the page and start typing… search results appear magically below, pushing the page’s text down.
For us, this was an improvement – a way to search from anywhere, without losing context. But when I actually tried to use it, it constantly confused me.
I would search for recipes from Joe’s profile page and get not only Joe’s, but everyone’s recipes in my search results. Or I would confuse the search result’s list of recipes with the real list of recipes the page was presenting. Or I just thought it wacky that the contents on the page I was on, jumped down the page.
Some of these could be hacked around, fixed through formatting, but none really removed the confusion – people expect search to be on a separate page. In trying to improve usability, the rule of building what people expected and were used to, was restraining us. But if you don’t build what people expect and are used to, how can you improve usability? We get caught in a vicious UI circle.
Of course there are exceptions
Obvious exceptions to this are situations where the UI was so horribly painful in the first place – take reordering as an example. Until relatively recently, there were no elegant solutions: you could click ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrows until the item in your list was in the right place; you could type in the ‘order’ of the item in the list as a number… but you couldn’t do the most obvious drag-and-drop of the item into its correct place until we got ’standard’ javascript libraries (such as prototype + script.aculo.us, jQuery, Dojo, etcetera – yes I know there were other drag-and-drop ’solutions’ before this).
So what do we do?
We ended up compromising (ok, it is a hack) – when you begin searching, other content on the page disappears, so you don’t get confused. But when you clear your search text, the content reappears. This gives us a faster search, but you lose a little of the context.
Maybe the way to break the vicious UI cycle is to focus on one small, incremental improvement at a time.
Tags: ui