The Design of Everyday Things III

or

Why did you change it? What was wrong with it as it was? Where's the feedback now?

Imagine the scene... you're travelling along the motorway at 69.7mph, 315ft behind the car in front. The windscreen is getting slightly misty so you decide to use your car's blower to direct a blast of air on the windscreen.  You risk a glance at the digital climate control console:

That's blowing on the windscreen and your feet.

You look for *the button*

You press it, and risk another glance at the console:

That's now blowing at the windscreen, your feet and your face; that's less effective than the last one, so you press the button again. And another glance:

Hmm, now it's not blowing on the windscreen at all. Just your feet and face. The windscreen's getting more misty now. Let's see what the button does this time:

I don't even know what this symbol means. I get feet and face, but "up"? Symbolised by an empty triangle instead of filled... still, it's not blowing on the windscreen, so let's hit the button. Again. And look. Again.

Ok, it's not pointing at your feet any more. Just your face, and "up". You sigh. The windscreen mists up even more. You press the button. Surely...

No. It's just blowing directly at your face. You wish hard, and press the button again.

At last, you now have air blowing at your windscreen.

But at what potential cost?  Assuming you followed the instructions above, you will have taken your eyes off the road 8 times. There's no link between a push of the button and its result. Compare this to the more traditional analogue heater/blower console:

One glance and you can see that to get air on the windscreen, you need to twist the right-hand dial 1/5 clockwise. You'll feel the 1/5 turn, you'll get instant feedback. Simple. Great UX.

For a Great UX, Consider the Colour Blind

Among my deficiencies is colour blindness; I'm not at the far end of the scale, but I have the traditional problems with reds/greens/browns. As Steve Fenton said (almost word-for-word) on his blog Test Your Website For Colour Blindness Issues, if you are not testing your website for colour-blindness, you are being stupid. I couldn't agree more.

So it's frustrating that when logging in to a major UK financial website, I am confronted by these buttons:

The vast majority of the thousands of you reading this will be thinking I don't get it; the rest of us will be thinking why did they choose the same colour for the "Log in" and "Clear" buttons?
The colours of these buttons are shown here, as various types of colour vision deficient people would see them (taken from the Color Blind Spectrum):

Normal	Protanopia	Deutanopia	Tritanoptia
#339900	#958600	#a58600	#518f9a
#cc0000	#786c1e	#886900	#cc1600

My colour blindness is Protanopia; you can see how I perceive the green and red buttons, and the lack of contrast between them.

With that in mind, imagine my delight when I pointed my web browser at the home page of the offending web site and saw a link that says High contrast

It does what it says on the tin; click it and you get this

In my naivity, I expected that when I clicked on the link to take me to the login screen, that too would be in High contrast mode. I expected the Log in and Clear buttons to be highly contrasted. This is what I got:

*sigh*  So nearly a great UX, but so far from one.

The Design of Everyday Things II or Don't Make Me Think

We have recently had a refit of the kitchen at work, and we have acquired some nice-looking canisters for tea, coffee and sugar. This is them:

How long does it take you to work out which one holds, for example, the sugar? Each time I make a cup of tea (and I drink a lot of tea), I need to put conscious effort into choosing the canister with tea in.

As Don Norman says in his book The Design Of Everyday Things, the designer probably won an award for them; and that's not a good thing. This is exactly what he talks about when he talks about knowledge "in the world" and not "in the head".

That's all, it's just a rant.

The Design of Everyday Things or It's Not My Fault

A few months ago I read a book that appeared on a few developers' Must Read lists; The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. It's a cracker, I'd recommend it to anyone to have a read.

The main message that I took from the book is that when you interact with an object that someone has designed, if your interaction with the object goes wrong again and again, it's not your fault. The fault is with the designer of the object, who clearly didn't put enough effort into designing the human interaction or listen to feedback from users of the object.

As an example, take my microwave oven. One easy-to-understand concept of ovens is the hotter it is, the quicker it performs its function. Linked to this easy-to-understand concept is another, namely that the higher the number the hotter the oven: Gas Mark 6 is hotter than Gas Mark 4; 210°C is hotter than 180°C; 850W is hotter than 650W.
My microwave oven has a grill function built in, so when I fancy cheese on toast I fire it up. The power options available for the grill are 1,2 or 3. Given the convention, 3 is higher than 1, 3 must be the hottest. It must be, that's the convention. Wrong. My cheese on toast, instead of being melted bubbling cheese on piping-hot toasty bread, is sweaty slightly-warmer-than-when-it-went-in cheese on lukewarm toast.

Apart from using a set of numbers that are counter-intuitive, there's another way I could understand what power I'd selected; the designer could have used the LED screen to display "LOW", "MED" or "HI", depending on the number of button presses. This would give me instant feedback of what my repeated button presses were likely to make my cheese do. As Donald Norman would say, it's knowledge in the world as opposed to knowledge in the head; there's should be no reason for me to remember 1=high and 3=low.

The niggly grill power issue annoyed a few times until I came up with my own solution - I added a label next to the grill power-select button. (See image above).

I thought my days of being annoyed at the stupidity of the microwave designers were over until tonight. We decided we'd have jacket potatoes as part of our dinner. The oven was hot with a pie in it, so I thought we could cook the potatoes in the microwave and crisp them up in the oven. 10 minutes should do it. This leads me to another convention that I've learned with my microwave; the number of minutes you want to cook things for corresponds exactly to the number of presses of the "1 min" button; a can of soup is 2 minutes (2 presses), remove to stir, 2 more minutes (2 more presses). A microwave dinner is 6 minutes (6 presses). Jacket potatoes, 10 minutes (10 presses). No, no, no.

It turns out that if you want 10 minutes, you have to (not "can", but "have to") press the "10 min" button. After 9 presses of the "1 min" button, the LED screen shows "9 min". The next press, which I would expect to make the screen show "10 min", makes the screen show nothing. It completely ignores the fact that you've pressed the button 9 times already. Instead of cleverly [intuitively?] adding another 1 to the number of minutes cooking time and displaying 10, or even ignoring the next press of the 1 button, it has been programmed to erase any memory of the previous button presses.

As Donald Norman says, it's not my fault. It's the fault of the engineer who learnt the interface during design and testing of the microwave, and didn't bother to send it out for usability testing...