You can pretty safely assume that any article with a title that starts
with some variation of "10 Great Tips For..." is going to knock your
socks off. Case in point: Dmitry Fadeyev's article for Smashing Magazine entitled "10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs."
Fine, Dmitry didn't break any new ground, but he did describe a
few techniques that I've been considering for our application. One UI technique in particular I've been pondering for a while. He calls them hover controls.
The administration portion of the Compendium Blogware platform includes a user list from which to perform various operations on individual users. Administrators can edit user info, grant or revoke administrator rights to users, etc, and there's precious little space left for adding new buttons. One way to squeeze more functionality into the user list is to use hover controls. If you've used any of the 37signals apps, you've seen these. You move your mouse over a simple-looking list of data, and icons will pop out of the row that you're hovering on. Click an icon to perform an action on the user in that row. If you move your pointer away from the row, the buttons disappear. It keeps the interface a little cleaner since the page isn't cluttered with action buttons for every row in the table.
Hover controls make a very slick-looking application, but it gains the slickness and clean appearance at the expense of a little usability. When a user of a website first loads a page to accomplish some task, the first thing they do is look for something to click. When the action links are hidden, the user may be confused. Even if the confusion lasts only for a second, odds are that they will apply a little red X next to the application in their subconsious. Too many little red Xs, and the user will have a negative emotional reaction to your application, although they might not be able to explain exactly why.
The moment of confusion is avoided only with training or experience in using the application, and probably a visual cue that there are hidden buttons. The hope of the UI designer is that the learning period is very short so that there isn't much time to build up many red Xs. Furthermore, we hope that the visual appeal of the page, the ease of accomplishing their task quickly, and the "neato" factor will earn enough green checkmarks that the user will have an overall positive reaction; that they will like using your application. Users are more productive if they like the application they're using, and making happy, productive users is what a UI engineer's job is all about.
The article: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/15/10-useful-techniques-to-improve-your-user-interface-designs/
The administration portion of the Compendium Blogware platform includes a user list from which to perform various operations on individual users. Administrators can edit user info, grant or revoke administrator rights to users, etc, and there's precious little space left for adding new buttons. One way to squeeze more functionality into the user list is to use hover controls. If you've used any of the 37signals apps, you've seen these. You move your mouse over a simple-looking list of data, and icons will pop out of the row that you're hovering on. Click an icon to perform an action on the user in that row. If you move your pointer away from the row, the buttons disappear. It keeps the interface a little cleaner since the page isn't cluttered with action buttons for every row in the table.
Hover controls make a very slick-looking application, but it gains the slickness and clean appearance at the expense of a little usability. When a user of a website first loads a page to accomplish some task, the first thing they do is look for something to click. When the action links are hidden, the user may be confused. Even if the confusion lasts only for a second, odds are that they will apply a little red X next to the application in their subconsious. Too many little red Xs, and the user will have a negative emotional reaction to your application, although they might not be able to explain exactly why.
The moment of confusion is avoided only with training or experience in using the application, and probably a visual cue that there are hidden buttons. The hope of the UI designer is that the learning period is very short so that there isn't much time to build up many red Xs. Furthermore, we hope that the visual appeal of the page, the ease of accomplishing their task quickly, and the "neato" factor will earn enough green checkmarks that the user will have an overall positive reaction; that they will like using your application. Users are more productive if they like the application they're using, and making happy, productive users is what a UI engineer's job is all about.
The article: http://www.smashingmagazine.
Comments for Slick-looking or Usable?
Leave a comment