Technology for your Mission

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. The for-profit version of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School of Excellence for Information, Society, and Technology (PGSIST) is in full swing and that plus work has kept me pretty busy.

Last night I attended a talk hosted by phillyCHI that inspired me to actually write something down. Jared Spool, a UX research of some note, spoke of intuitive and embraceable design (the graphic to the left is his). He attempted to define what makes a design intuitive and embraceable. All of what he said was entertaining, and much was useful, but one part stuck with me.

An intuitive design, he said, is unobtrusive. The user’s attention never wavers from the task at hand to the interface itself. Now, this isn’t a particularly novel concept. I’ve heard it several dozen times by now, and it is considered Canon in the UX world. It is, however, a concept with enormous ramifications, and a concept that has direct application in the world of Information Systems as a whole.

Information Systems exist to let the user get their work done. They should be unobtrusive, they should be unnoticeable. Their use should be autonomic. Technology should never exist for the sake of technology. If a user needs to take time out of their work to bridge the gap between their current knowledge and the knowledge they need to use the system, the system is not intuitive and needs to be addressed.

This means that system designers need to minimize the knowledge the system requires the user to know. It also needs to find a way to imperceptibly coach the user along the gap between their current knowledge and the needed knowledge. System designers also need to hide everything the user doesn’t need to know — the technical stuff — to avoid confusion.

Again, none of this is new. But it is a lesson that Systems Designers — as opposed to interface designers — have yet to learn.