As I was walking my dad through the process of buying music online and loading it onto his iPod, it occurred to me that one problem facing UI designers must be dealing with the expectation that the UI will suck. I feel like my parents sit down at a computer to accomplish a new task assuming it will be hard. When I say something like, “Ok, now move the files onto your iPod,” they assume they’re going to have to hunt down the right menu and find some command like “Move songs…”, or jump through some inane sequence of hoops they didn’t even know existed, or utter some cryptic incantation hidden deep within the online documentation, when in fact, all they had to do was drag the music files to the big icon of the iPod. In a lot of arenas, UI metaphors are far more literal these days than they have been in the past, but if people don’t expect things to be obvious, the things won’t be obvious.
Has anyone else observed this? Those of you who have experience in UI design, do UI designers consider this? If so, how do they deal with it?
Here is an example of scary bad UI design, care of Mangosquasher:
shouldn’t designers design with the average user in mind? that is, the average computer user has been trained (for better or, more likely, for worse) by win32 GUIs?
but if a designer is tugged in one direction by win32 menu structure expectations, surely that same designer is tugged in the opposite direction by the principles of intuitive designs.
or perhaps design of interfaces suffers its own, more general “vocabulary problem“? that is, given a common task, there is utterly no convergence over what “the elegant” or “the best” way is?
i remember growing up playing video games thinking ‘if only i could have designed the levels, i would have done this…’, or ‘wouldn’t it be cool if the game was really about…’. i was also that kid who would exhaust all the options in the ‘choose your own adventure books’ (yes, i admit i read those). i always wanted to customize things MY way.
i still get this feeling today when i work with uis, except now i think, ‘wouldn’t it be better if the design was like…’, or ‘i wish i could visualize the data like this…’ i think there is a ‘good practice’ but no best practice in ui design, because everyone wants information in a way they expect the system to handle and return it. part of this is clearly conditioning on things like win32 systems, or just an expectation that technology or machines can’t possibly handle task ‘X’ easily.
as others pointed out last time the wget example came up, that interface might not be as bad as it appears if you understand the underlying, already complex, wget command line tool. for a power wget user, it might actually work very well for them.
i wonder what makes a ui good, what properties have some sort of ubiquitous nature about them which forces them to reappear over and over? for example, in the real world the steering wheel & pedal interface of automobiles is the only interface i can think of for controlling a car. similar interfaces appear in planes
, and tanks, but not in submarines or boats (or the powerranger’s megazord robot) 
. Is there a reason why this interface dominates over other interfaces frequently proposed in concept cars? does this contradict my theory that there are only ‘good ui practices’ not best ui practices?
First, Power Rangers FTW. Second, though I know little at present about UI design, I imagine that like n8 and k7 said there are no perfect UIs, only context-dependent goals and expectations. I like the idea of the UI vocab problem. The “vocab problem” is probably a problem with any symbolic system, be it language or HCI. It would be cool to see how many different metaphors for deleting a file you could get out of people who’d never used a computer before. Well, after you explain to them what files are. And what deleting is…