Computers weren’t always the things of beauty we have today with sleek lines and smooth edges with colorful icons that pulsate when we stroke them. As recent as twenty years ago, you had to press a physical button that “clicked” or type in a long command of slashes, dashes and abbreviations to get them to do anything. The screens would glow a florescent green or amber. Printers clicked away in the background like rapid fire machine guns. It was even quicker to use a pencil and paper to jot down notes from the screen. Email, well, email didn’t exist. You had to post messages on bulletin boards that you dialed into with your 300 baud modem and check back hours later hoping someone replied. People who did these things were considered technical geniuses. Today, we can do all these things and more from the palm of our hand.
What does this have to do with users and interface design today? Well, computers are not the only things that have changed. So have the users. No I don’t mean they’ve put on a new shirt or cut their hair. I mean the audience has changed. By 1990 more than 15% of households had a computer. That’s right, one computer in the house. By 2000 that number had risen to 50%. Today it is estimated that there are 2 computers per adult and 1 per child in each house.
The user no longer needs to understand every detail about the computer in order to use one. Anyone can press a key, click a mouse or touch a screen. We, as programmers and designers, can no longer depend on the intelligence of the user to help us reach our goal. That’s not to say that users are idiots, as the title might suggest. Put a dozen people in a room and collectively they may equal genius. But individually we all have something we could learn from each other.
No, it’s not the intelligence that I am concerned with. It’s the patience. We are used to nearly instant information. Answers at our fingertips…Search the web…Speak a question into your phone. We all expect the answers to be nearly instantaneous. We, including me, are lazy.
Why press two buttons, when one would work? There, I’ve said it. Took me long enough to say. And I appreciate your patience. Now let me provide a simple example.
Let’s say I have a form asking “How do you like your Tea?” On it are two controls. A drop down list containing three items (Hot, Warm, Cold), and a button that says OK. To answer my question you have to click the drop down, select the item and then click the OK button. That’s three things you had to do. Once upon a time you had no choice but to require all those steps. And the users who simply clicked the OK button without picking from the list were deemed idiots.
With the advances we have seen today, something as simple as the above form can be simplified even more. Let’s say I instead give you the same question with three buttons that read “Hot”, “Warm” and “Cold”. Go ahead. Pick a button, any button. One click and there’s the answer.
As obvious as the above may sound, it is often over looked because we, as developers and designers, have ourselves been programmed over the years to think a certain way. We have always done it to code, as it were. X followed by Y followed by Z. But if you consider how technology has changed, how the phone in your hand is faster than the computer you used back in school, then you have to also take into consideration that X just might not be X anymore.
It’s not that I am suggesting you think outside of the box. The box is where we live, all of us, regardless of what we do.
What I am suggesting is that the box just isn’t square anymore.
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