On the weekend I was fortunate enough to visit the National Museum in Canberra. Didn’t get to see any of the exhibits, I was too busy being bowled over by the building. It was a delight. Playful, imaginative, energetic. Downright funky. Melbourne’s ARM architects (the guys behind Storey Hall and the Shrine extension) have done us proud again. If you are in Canberra it’s well worth visiting.
One of the many features is the Garden of Australian Dreams – a central interpretative courtyard representing our multi-facited history and aspirations.
You can see in the picture the wading pool. The edge is actually the top end of Australia. Yep, layers of symbolism. And I’m sure the designers were really proud of how much they layered into this area.
But then this happens:
The design is built and launched and then sometime later someone either loses their nerve in the face of litigious fear or little Caleb falls into the water and a complaint is made. The result is this awful sign that detracts from the overall design, sticking out like a sore thumb.
It’s sad, but being realistic and pragmatic, we have to expect this sort of thing as designers. And design for it up-front. And sometimes that means compromising the integrity of the “design vision” to ensure it survives real life wear and tear. They could have just moved some of the “islands” a little closer to the mainland so they were within stepping distance. No need for a sign then. Sure, it wouldn’t have been technically correct. But it probably doesn’t matter. And it would certainly be less noticeable than the over-protective signs.
What’s are our over-spaced islands? We face them all the time. Great design will anticipate them and design the compromises rather than letting compromises just happen to the design once we step away.
Every time we add a feature or an option to our designs there is a cost. The cognitive (plain-talk: thinking) load for the user goes up. Sometimes the benefits of that feature or option make it worth it. Often they don’t. And yes, as smart designers we know some of the best ways of representing those features so they have a minimal mental footprint, but it is still a trade-off we need to consciously make.
And unfortunately (or just realistically), we are often the only ones carrying the Let’s Keep It Simple can. Product people can just be myopically focussed on their particular feature and want it get it into the product at whatever cost to the overall user experience. But that’s partly their job and their perspective. What we bring to the table is that overall perspective for how best to arrange (or remove) the pieces to make the whole experience sing.
But it’s not just “evil” Product trying to load up our pages with all manner of things. We have to fight that inclination ourselves. One of the cold realities of design is that it is easier to add than subtract. It has to be our mantra to be always saying “how can we simplify, how can we simplify, how can we simplify…?” It takes huge discipline and a whole lot of thought.
And guess what? We don’t have to give users every option under the sun – something for every possible situation. Sometimes (and often) that just costs too much – too much time to develop, too much time to user test, too much time to specify, but definitely too much time to comprehend.
And interestingly, we are a lot better at seeing that in the real world than online. There is a point where there are more Chiodo shirts than can fit in my cupboard, no matter how much denial I want to wrap around that reality. The real world has a way of enforcing “what? are you crazy?” constraints. In the virtual world it is all too easy to just keep extending the page, adding another tab, designing another dialog, adding another level to the page structure.
37signals, defenders of simple, not surprisingly have some good things to say about this topic in their recent “Outsourcing Choice” post.
Ever noticed how rude and dumb some of the machines around us are?
There are 2 cases in point:
Recently on my trip to Auckland, I was using a vending machine to get a ticket to go up the big tower there. Using the machine I had to navigate through a series of inane questions, along the lines of: Do you want to buy a ticket? Yes. How do you want to pay for that? Cash. Do you want to use notes or coins? Coins. I was over it before I’d started. Why couldn’t it just response to whether I swiped my card, feed notes into the slot or inserted coins? I think it could have answered its own questions. To make matters worse, when it finally spat out the ticket, it literally did just that – the ticket came out of a low positioned slot and dropped to the ground. You’d sack such a dumb and rude kiosk operator after a day.
95% of the time I go to my Westpac ATM I get out either $80 or $130. It’s actually all about getting enough $20 notes so I don’t have to manage $50 notes. But every time I use the machine, it offers me the standard “shortcuts” to the standard withdrawal amounts – $20, $50, $100, etc. If I was going into a branch and dealing with the same teller day after day, pretty soon they would say “Hey Brett – what’s it going to be today? $80 or $130? or something else?”. And to cap it off, when it is pushing out the money, “Michelle”, the humanising woman on the screen cheerily says “Here’s your money and receipt if you asked for one”. Poor Michelle with the short-term memory problem – just moments before I’d told her I didn’t want a receipt.
Why do we accept behaviour from machines that we won’t from people?
To put it another way: As we are designing interfaces, it’s a great test to ask “If this was a person, it is being smart, friendly and polite?”.
For the last few months I’ve been enjoying getting to know my iPhone. It’s been a joy. Actually, the getting to know you process happened pretty quickly. And that’s one of the great benefits of simplicity – you quickly understand the scope of the thing you are getting used to.
My experience with my iPhone contrasts nicely with my previous smartphone – the Palm Treo 750 running Windows Mobile. I’d been a Windows Mobile user for years – I remember stalking stores in late 2000 to get one of the first Compaq iPaqs when they hit Australia. But I never really felt I fully understood Windows Mobile. It always seemed a big thing squished into a little box. This was especially true of all the settings and preferences.
In contrast I’d got to the end of all the applications and settings of my iPhone in the first 15 minutes. I knew everything I could do with it and what I couldn’t. I’d found the edges. I felt in control.
And that’s one of the great upsides of simplicity. When we encounter and use simple things, we quickly discovered where the edges are. And once we know the edges, we can confidently build a picture or story in our head about how this new thing works. We feel in control. There’s not that lurking (demeaning) doubt that there may be a better way of doing something or that we are missing a feature that would be really useful. We can explain it to other people – and probably recommend it too. It truly becomes our tool, rather than feeling partially at the mercy of this piece of technology.
Simplicity is hard, especially as we add functionality. But it’s always worth the effort.
I’ve been thinking about the advances in search technology. Some of the capability that’s now possible with FAST is very inspiring, particularly in vertical domain search. It conjured up this food service analogy in my mind to understand the way we experience search now compared to what is possible either now or very soon…
OLD SEARCH = Fast Food Operator
You go to McDonalds. A good experience is determined by 1) your ability to precisely ask for what you want, and 2) how quickly the person serving you can assemble and serve your request.
Just like in current search. If you want a good experience, best to phrase your request in terms well understood by the site and hope they have done a good job organising things behind the scenes to serve it up fast.
NEW SEARCH = Silver Service Waiter
You’re at Vue du Monde. Your waiter already starts to suss you out and adapt the experience the moment you walk in the door. Initially this is just superficially based on her knowledge of what she thinks people like you prefer. But you chat and soon she’s adapting the service with what she’s explicitly learnt about your food preferences. Some of what she’s doing you don’t even realise, but you’re having a wonderful time. The wine’s perfectly complimenting each course. The little pile of discarded and disdained cucumber from the second course results in a cucumber-free fourth course – not that you even realised you were in for cucumber parfait. Having overheard you’re plan to walk home afterwards, she’s she offered to get you a taxi instead because rain is forecast. Your whole experience is smooth, effortless and deeply satisfying.
So it will be with new search. The system is attentive to anything it can use from your behaviour and other external clues about you to adapt the experience and make it effortless. You want to come back again and again because the more you use the search, the better it gets at adapting and anticipating your needs. It’s genuinely helpful.
Remember your first experience of using Google. Remember how it spread through word of mouth. “You’ve got to use Google! It’s a new search site. Yeah, it’s a funny name, but it’s amazing. You type something in and it just seems to know the site you’re was thinking.”
That was then. Our expectations are moving on. But interestingly we’ll talk about the winner of new search in a similar way. We’ll love it because we are wowed by its smarts and the way it almost instinctively knows what we want. We’ll love it because it makes our task and our lives that much easier.
We’ve all that those customer services experiences where someone goes the extra mile for you (you’ve left your wallet in a cafe and they track you down to deliver it back to you; they ring you back after you book a performance to let you know that the guest artist is only appearing on the other night and do you want to swap your booking). Sadly, they are all too uncommon. But then they happen, it’s gold - remarkable really, in the true sense of the word - it causes you to remark. And it’s the sort of thing that breeds loyalty and again demonstrates that merely meeting people’s needs is not enough.
You get the same feeling when you encounter it with software. It happened to be twice this morning.
Drag-n-Drop Registration in MarsEdit - I’ve being using the Mac OS blogging client MarsEdit, liking it a lot, and decided to buy it. The registration dialog in the application is pretty standard: a button to go to this online store webpage and then fields for your name and serial number once you’ve purchased it. But then there was this: Highlight the registration details in the resulting purchase confirmation email and drag it to the dialog and it fills out the dialog’s files for you and advanced you onto the “all done” screen. No field-by-field copy and paste.
Running Applications in Spaces - Later, when I wanted to bind the MarsEdit application to one of my Spaces in Mac OS X, I clicked the “Add Application” button expecting to be dumping into the operation system Applications folder showing all my applications. But now in 10.5.3, you get a shortcut menu that first shows you all the running applications before offering you the full list. Nice. It’s probably more likely that the application I want is one I’m already using.
Both of these examples leave you with the feeling that the people responsible care. Both required extra detail to be designed and extra code to be written. But somehow that mattered more than getting me to do the work. That’s great customer service. That builds loyalty.
