I've worked with designers who justify making multiple interfaces for similar functions. Frankly, this approach is almost always wrong and results in confusing interfaces and repetitive, difficult to maintain implementations.
Simplifying an experience to it's essence and ensuring that users learn quickly through consistency is key to design.
Bad designers are often quick to justify why two similar functions need different interfaces. Good designers understand that combining similar functions eliminates cognitive noise and creates the opportunity to add more features more easily and more understandably.
The author of this post strikes me as the bad sort of designer, one who views design as anything other than engineering and who justifies bad design with tortured "emotional" arguments.
Users are emotionally happy when they accomplish what they intend, understand and learn quickly, and feel confident they can repeat their result. Users are not happy when you force a single course of action through one-off behavior driven tunnel visioned design, leaving them confused and disoriented afterwards.
I've seen this before, and it is the product of egotistical designers caught up in their art instead of their users' experience.
Bill was right on this one. Windows interface sucks because it was not designed from the ground up with the user experience in mind by a comprehensive intelligent creator, not because it fails "emotionally" or lacks art.
Is this true in the design world? I personally like having many options, or multiple ways to accomplish the same result, as long as they don't get in the way of each other.
For instance, I would be sad if my phone only gave me one way to turn up the volume. Instead, I like that it gives me 3-4-5 different ways, all useful for different contexts. However, it would also make me sad if it wasn't 'easy' to turn up the volume.
Isn't it the designers job to consider all the different operational contexts and understand all the usage scenarios in all those contexts? And, to make its use 'easy'?
> Isn't it the designers job to consider all the different operational contexts and understand all the usage scenarios in all those contexts? And, to make its use easy?
People wouldn't mind if that's what designers did. And it's probably what good designers do - perhaps good design is invisible to most users.
But for examples of what bad designers do see the user interfaces of many graphics manipulation programs over the years. See especially "Kai" and their awful interfaces. Media players are similarly awful.
I don't mind if my one phone gives me 3 ways to do one thing. What I do mind is if that is different for every phone, even from the same manufacturer, and it changes each time they release a new phone.
> For instance, I would be sad if my phone only gave me one way to turn up the volume. Instead, I like that it gives me 3-4-5 different ways, all useful for different contexts.
Huh? What are these "different contexts" for volume on a phone? (There are different things with volume, such as a call vs the ringer, but that's different.)
I don't argue against having multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing - that should be limited but is certainly useful in many circumstances. The issue I have is designing different interfaces for the same feature because you can't think of a way to provide a common one for two use cases or user types. A classic example is wizards, which are terribly abused by Microsoft as an alternative to well designed configuration pages. These wizards don't teach the user how to actually configure the system, are often not reusable, and are only sufficient for a subset of use cases.
Another example is encouraging have customization of tool bars. Well designed menus and toolbars don't need to be dragged, dropped, renamed, etc. Allowing this confuses other users of the same software and makes fixing interface problems down the line nearly impossible without undoing all that customization.
Need to edit your user account? Do we need a different interface if you are an admin? Probably not - just a few more fields. Need a file chooser? The same one works for opening word documents as selecting a file for upload.
Most people have found UIs built by developers to be hard to use and ugly. Based on this fact, it's logical to discount approaches to interaction design that are rooted in software development principles.
Simplifying an experience to it's essence and ensuring that users learn quickly through consistency is key to design.
Bad designers are often quick to justify why two similar functions need different interfaces. Good designers understand that combining similar functions eliminates cognitive noise and creates the opportunity to add more features more easily and more understandably.
The author of this post strikes me as the bad sort of designer, one who views design as anything other than engineering and who justifies bad design with tortured "emotional" arguments.
Users are emotionally happy when they accomplish what they intend, understand and learn quickly, and feel confident they can repeat their result. Users are not happy when you force a single course of action through one-off behavior driven tunnel visioned design, leaving them confused and disoriented afterwards.
I've seen this before, and it is the product of egotistical designers caught up in their art instead of their users' experience.
Bill was right on this one. Windows interface sucks because it was not designed from the ground up with the user experience in mind by a comprehensive intelligent creator, not because it fails "emotionally" or lacks art.