Tag: task commonality

According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the worst mistakes in GUI design are domain-specific. Usually, he says, applications fail because they:

• solve the wrong problem.
• have the wrong features for the right problem.
• make the right features too complicated to understand.

Nielsen’s last point reminds me of what a product manager once told me: many users of highly specialised software think of themselves as experts, but only few are. His hypothesis? Elaborate sets of features are too numerous or complex to learn fully.

One of my projects involved software for dieticians. The software allowed users to enter a recipe. The software would calculate the nutritive value per portion. Users learned the basic settings for an adequate result. They ignored the extra features that could take into consideration various complex chemical interactions between the recipe ingredients. The extra features—the visual and cognitive complexity—got ignored. Ironically, their very presence increased the likelihood that users would satisfice, or avoid the short-term pain of learning something new. When the product was developed, each extra bit seemed a good idea, and they may also each have helped sell the product. But, good idea or not, those extra features needed to be removed, or hidden from the majority of users, or redesigned.

Resolving the “extra features” problem

1. If the extra features are superfluous, remove them. Usage data can help identify seldom-used features, and many of our products are capable of collecting usage data, though we currently only collect it after crashes and mainly during Beta testing. However, removing a seldom-used part of an existing feature is a complex decision, and one for the Product Manager to make. The difficulty lies in determining whether a feature would be used more if it were simpler to use. In that case, it may not be superfluous.
2. If the extra features are used only occasionally by relatively few users, then hide them. The suggested GUI treatment for an occasional-by-few control is to expose it only in the context of a related task. Do not clutter the main application window, menu bar, or the main dialog boxes with controls for occasional-by-few tasks. Hiding the controls for an occasional-by-few task is supported by the Isaacs-Walendowski frequency-commonality grid:

If the   feature is…	Used by many	Used by few
Used frequently	GUI treatment: •  Visible. •  Few clicks.	GUI treatment: •  Suggested. •  Few clicks.
Used occasionally	GUI treatment: •  Suggested. •  More clicks.	GUI treatment: •  Hidden. •  More clicks.

3. If the extra feature is to be a core feature, simplify it. I’m talking about a feature that the Product Manager believes would be used frequently or by many if users could figure it out. Burying or hiding such features isn’t the answer. You need to find ways to reduce complexity by designing the interaction well and by organising the GUI well. For this, Five Sketches™ can help.

What are the requirements, really?

All this begs the question: who can tell us which features are the extra features (the features to omit), which ones are occasional-by-few (the features to hide), and which ones are used frequently or by many users (the features on which to focus your biggest design-guns)? Nielsen says “Base your decisions on user research” and then test the early designs with users. He adds:

People don’t want to hear me say that they need to test their UI. And they definitely don’t want to hear that they have to actually move their precious butts to a customer location to watch real people do the work the application is supposed to support. The general idea seems to be that real programmers can’t be let out of their cages. My view is just the opposite: no one should be allowed to work on an application unless they’ve spent a day observing a few end users.  …More.

Conclusion: conduct user research and use what you learn to inform the design.