I regularly come across people who are used to not being able to use things. They’ve learnt to accept it. The answer to not being able to perform a fairly simple task is to refer to a manual, or book a training session.
This isn’t because these people are stupid, it’s because the designers of the interfaces they are using made them so difficult to operate sometimes the only way to figure them out is with expert help.
One of the exercises I remember most clearly from my design degree is a time we had to specify all the steps involved in making a cup of tea. It proved – for us usability novices – to be a brilliant example of how apparently simple tasks involve some fairly complex steps – and more steps than you might initially assume (I feel a little competition coming on…!).
My reason for mentioning that is because a lot of the time the tasks we perform on screen are akin to tasks we perform in the real world. And this is (still) so often forgotten by interface designers.
I once filled out an online job application. I spent about a week pruning my CV as the form fields only allowed a very small number of characters. The evening before the deadline I was finally at a point where I’d squeezed pretty much everything into the minuscule text areas and I hit the ‘Submit Application’ button.
To my horror, the page that loaded in front of me said (words to the effect of): ‘Now please specify how your skills and experience are suitable for this role’ – in 2000 words! There was absolutely no indication that this part of the form existed!
In the ‘real world’ I can easily ascertain the size of the form by the number of pages it is printed on. I can have a quick scan of the entire form before filling it in by turning it over in my hands. I can easily and quickly plan what I’m going to write about in each section. If the designers of this particular online application had spent a bit of time considering the real world equivalent it could have saved me a whole load of frustration and panic!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against user manuals or training sessions, they are sometimes necessary for more complex tasks, but interfaces should at least fundamentally make sense in the first place.
This is especially true the more complex the process. For example, I would like to think that the interfaces used by workers in nuclear power plants are simple enough so that when the big red warning light starts flashing they don’t have to look out a manual to figure out what it means.
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