Thu 16 Jul 2009
User Centric IT
Posted by schenkin under planning
[2] Comments
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.
The problem is that far too often, “intuitive” means “familiar” to users. It’s a bias problem really. For someone who has used traditional corporate mail their entire lives, such as Outlook or Lotus, Hotmail will be a more intuitive system than Gmail because the folder interface is more familiar to what they already know. Never mind the fact that Gmail is far more flexible with its labels and archiving features (and objectively speaking, more intuitive to a technological neophyte).
A lot of times, “minimizing” the amount of knowledge a system requires a user to know doesn’t remove that much information at all. Powerful pieces of software, such as Excel, Photoshop, Final Cut, etc. are powerful because they require a commitment to learn them. Sure, it’s easier for a user to pick up Windows Movie Maker or Paint, but they won’t be given nearly as many features to utilize in order to perform their job. I would say it’s not the minimizing that’s important – it’s the art of providing enough of a reward for the commitment a user makes at all parts of the user spectrum.
It’s all about your audience. Excel and Photoshop get away with it because their users have a level of sophistication. And for entry level users, it tends to hide the complicated stuff away behind menus and shortcuts.
With that said, I’m not really interested in debating the merits of complicated software — find a UX person for that
. I want to explore how you can take these lessons from software development and apply them to the Information System as a whole.