“A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”
— unknown
There are two elevators in the building where I work, including one that doubles as a freight elevator — it has front and back doors for access. This particular elevator has a bank of buttons shown in the photo below. The buttons for the rear door are denoted by the “R” next to the floor number.
Here’s why these buttons frustrate me. Quickly, tell me which open and close door buttons work for the front and rear doors! Yeah, I can’t tell, either! You would think that the upper buttons control the front and the lower ones control the rear, but you can’t discern that from the way it’s laid out (and I’ve found that it isn’t necessarily the case). I have had multiple occasions where I’ve tried to hold the door open for someone rushing to catch the elevator, and ended up hitting the wrong button.
Had these buttons been properly laid out, the open and close door buttons would both been placed under each respective door button column — i.e. the open and close door buttons that control the rear door should have been placed under the buttons marked “R,” which would clearly indicate that those buttons are used for the rear door. That would make sense, wouldn’t it?
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been frustrated by a product simply because the user interface was poorly designed. I would expect every hand in the room to be up.
Don Norman, an academic researcher considered to be an expert in usability design, talks about this phenomenon in his book, The Design of Everyday Things (disclosure: at the time of this article, I have not read this book — yet). One very common example involves doors. How many times have you come across a door with a handle, leading you to think you need to pull it to open the door? Yet when you try it, it turns out that you need to push, not pull it, to open. It’s extremely frustrating, and it happens more often than you think — so often, in fact, that it even has a name: a Norman door.
If you don’t think good design isn’t a big deal, there have been documented cases where poorly designed interfaces resulted in a significant loss of life. I did a Google search for “disasters resulting from bad design,” and the results were startling.
This subject is of particular interest to me, speaking as someone whose job revolves extensively around technical communication, technical writing, and front-end development. In my line of work, design and layout are a big deal. I have seen many examples on the job of horrible documentation and bad interfaces — and poor design was a major factor. I mentioned in an earlier article that I came across illustrations in a company document that were completely useless. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but if they’re not properly used — and yes, there is a wrong way to use them — they can be worth exactly zero words. Likewise, one of my current projects is working on how to make an internal corporate social network work for my department. I’ve discovered that I have a love/hate relationship with it; while I have no problem with the concept, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. One of the most basic questions I have with this system which it fails to answer — and which should only be answered by the interface design without having to look up instructions — is, “where am I supposed to begin?!?”
Interfaces exist in just about every facet of our lives, including, but not limited to, application front-ends. Good sensible design must be involved in creating them. More often than not, they’re just “thrown together” without any thought as to how they should be laid out and how they are to be used. The consequences of poor design abound. In the best of cases, such as with Norman doors, they are just annoying. But in the worst cases, they can have disastrous and fatal results.
Welcome to Ray Kim's 'blog 