Since entering the sphere of Microsoft development, I have frequented Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog. I have linked to it before on this blog and again this past week, I found a post worth commenting on. Reducing User Interface Friction is Jeff's take on a post, Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design, by Tantak Celik, Chief Technologist at Technorati.
Specifically, Jeff focuses on "cognitive load" in user interfaces. As usual, the primary sources are the best place to go for an explanation, but the 10 second summary is that the lower the cognitive load, the better the interface. The way to lower cognitive load is to decrease the number of actions, such as clicks that a user needs to take to accomplish his or her task.
While Tantak contrasts IM to email, Jeff returns to Google's ubiquitous single text box design as the kind of holy grail of user interface. So far so good for me, but that got me thinking about design, so I strolled over to Don Norman's website to read up on some of his thoughts on the topic.*
A former VP at Apple, Don is also a prolific writer about human computer interaction and design in general. So, it was a happy coincidence to see that he had also written on the subject of Google's interface. The title does a pretty good job of summarizing his thoughts, The truth about Google's so-called "simplicity". For Don, Google is not really that great of an interface because you can only do one thing with that one text box, which is search. So, MSN and Yahoo!, while their main pages look crowded are actually easier to use because they don't hide their functionality.
So, as usual, anything worth debating has strong proponents on both sides. Is Google's interface simple and wonderful or sneakily bland, a facade of simplicity over a tangle of complexity?
I go with strong and wonderful. The problem with Don's essay is that he is comparing apples to oranges. MSN and Yahoo! are web portals first and foremost that happen to have search engines. Google is a search engine that happens to have enough functionality to compare to a web portal.
The difference is easy to spot; if you go to MSN.com and want to get directions somewhere, you see a whole slew of links, that if you read through, you can spot Maps & Directions, click on that and you're on your way. On Google, you have a text box, so what do you do? You type in the address you want to go to and the first result of the search is a link to a map.
So by default, unless you just give up and don't interact with Google, you find your way to what you want. If you try the same interaction on MSN.com, you can click on the the Maps tab on the toolbar in the search results, but again, that's an extra click you have to find amongst several options.
Google is certainly not perfect in this regard, as Don rightly points out. Not everything is linked up like it should be. At one point, I remember seeing Google Groups results included as the last item in search results, which was very useful when researching coding issues, and now I don't see them anymore. Similarly, the integration with Froogle is only OK, a price for the item I want to buy is often the first link returned, but it could be more obvious.
This circles back to the original point. Google.com is primarily a search engine (really, an ad company), which has been enriched enough to often function as a portal, though not perfectly. So comparing it to MSN and Yahoo! is not really fruitful because you do not have a common baseline.
Finally, while Don derides the query language extras of Google, such as getting a definition for a word using "define:word" syntax, I love them. In effect, I get rewarded for repeated interactions with Google by getting access to a more powerful interface. While I could spend the time to setup a personalized page with MSN or Yahoo!, I prefer the approach of starting simple and building up, instead of starting with the complexity of a full grown portal ecosystem and having to decide what to bushwhack.
In the end, despite the possibility of an unfair comparison, user interface questions like these always come down to the user: what they want is what they want, no matter what you what you may want them to want.^ So, only market research and user testing can be the final arbiters of this debate. Although, with the trajectory of Google's stock, I would think that at least the Wall St. user's group has made its preference clear.
* I had the pleasure of taking a class or two about design that Don taught at Northwestern while I was still in school. His class was very informative, although a bit of an ego check. He firmly did not believe in coddling his students.
^ Please rapidly repeat this sentence ten times.
No, my blog does not look any different; this is a kind of appendix to Kevin Marshall's post on free utilities highlighting a couple of free tools that you might find useful for XP and Vista:
CutePDF Writer - Download the free Ghostscript converter, then the Writer download. Install. Now when you want to save something to a PDF, if you can print it, you can select the CutePDF Writer print driver and convert it. This is very useful for saving off web pages in a readable format.
MS Office 2007 Add-in: Save as PDF - This comes directly from Microsoft and adds PDF as one of the options in the save as file dialog. Works with Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. This is one is particularly useful if you want to distribute a document without it getting modified along the way.
Windows XP ClearType Tuner - Again, this one is directly from Microsoft. If you have XP and you have an LCD, you should have ClearType turned on. ClearType will dramatically improve the appearance of text on a LCD and save you some eye strain. ClearType is on by default in Vista. I think this one is pretty well known, but if you have not tried it yet, give it a try for a few days and you won't want to go back to a screen without it.
4096 Color Wheel - This page allows you to easily find a particular color you want to use on a web page and get its color code for your HTML/CSS. You can either mouse over a part of the wheel or use the keyboard to slowly rotate through colors that are closely grouped.
There are a couple of folks from Clarity at this year's MIX conference in Las Vegas (you can never beat Las Vegas for a convention) and they have been doing some blogging from the show. Lots of exciting announcements out of Microsoft as the Silverlight platform was officially unveiled, along with a new version of the CLR and a Dynamic Language Runtime (writing a Silverlight application in Python?).
I checked out the demo sites from the Silverlight link above and I think most us in the Microsoft development world will be doing some serious studying of this new platform in the coming weeks and months. Coupled with the release of Adobe's Apollo RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform, it looks like the applet is making a comeback.
Anyway, check out my co-workers blogs for more details:
Kudos to Dell for its IdeaStorm customer feedback site. First, for setting up a nice way for customers to give feedback; second, for actually listening. When Dell asked for feedback, they got a deluge of requests that they sell PCs with Linux installed. So, starting soon, you will be able to buy a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. This should also mean a corresponding drop in price for the models affected. These new offerings from Dell could fail to sell, falling victim to the Snakes on A Plane effect of Internet hype, but cheers to Dell for trying. It is certainly a more satisfying feedback system then the common and oh so convincing "Thank you. We'll take your feedback under consideration..."