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Eric Schaffer,
Ph.D., CPE, is CEO and Founder of Human Factors International, Inc.
He has been involved in creating and teaching software design for
more than 14 years. He can be reached by e-mail at
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John Sorflaten,
Ph.D., CPE, started out writing and directing training films and
documentaries then switched to UI design. "A screen is a screen,"
he says. He works at Human Factors International, Inc. and can be
reached by email at
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Meena Venkateswaran,
Ph.D., is a Senior Specialist at HFI.
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Glenn Miracle,
M.S., is a graduate student intern.
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This new series of articles will give you a front-line report from the
GUI revolution in corporate North America. Careful reading may save you
from some major combat losses in user interface (UI) design. The combat
metaphor is real because the enemy is wiley and pervasive. We'll give
you examples. At our screen design seminars, we pass out warning buttons
labeled "GUIs from Hell". We see the enemy as decisions made
in the name of "design" but that lack the soul of design. We
call the enemy "cryptodesign". Cryptodesign arises when a design
that works for certain situations gets used in different, inappropriate
situations.
Cryptodesign misleads the unwary Check the number of
times you walk out of an office complex grasping a doorhandle shaped to
say "pull me" while warning you with a label that says PUSH.
The unwarranted generalization of "handle" to both sides of
a one-way door shouts cryptodesign at work. You've see your VCR mercilessly
flashing 12:00 pm into the night (and day), reminding you of your slow-witted
inability to set the time. According to a consumer survey, a third of
TV viewers have given up ever setting a future video recording date and
time. Cryptodesign succeeds in maintaining a useless machine interface.
The message is clear. Cryptodesign says "a technique useful for one
situation is probably good in all situations." The antidote requires
that we breath life back into automatic design techniques. Let's call
the antidote "soul design".
"Soul design" bridges the gap between technology and user by
insuring that we change the technology to meet human needs. Our special
field is software and we feel obliged to report a sorry state of affairs
among managers and developers. Cultural cryptodesign has the upper hand.
For example, we have a CANCEL button on our GUI windows, a de facto standard
for English UIs. But which key lets you cancel? The ESCAPE key! The button
and the key do the same thing, but cryptodesigners gave them different
labels to which we are forced to adapt. By the way, don't press the SHIFT
key when you see the ubiquitous message "Press any key to continue."
It doesn't work. Users must learn exceptions to the instruction. How do
we gear up to eradicate cryptodesign? Developers and product managers
must enhance their sensitivity to the work demanded of computer users.
This is not a new idea. But developers really make progress when we speak
about the four different kinds of work users do. We call it the VIMM model,
for Visual, Intellectual, Memory, and Motor work. You can customize your
design techniques to reduce these types of work, once you know how to
look for them. Here are some examples.
Reduce memory work We found a floppy disk installation
instruction that required too much memory work. The instruction on the
floppy label reads "Insert the diskette in drive A: and type SETUP".
Then on the screen, the first instruction reads "Key in the code
from the label on the diskette, then press the RETURN key." Yes,
you've been set-up. You may lose the skirmish. The problem: if you remove
the floppy to check it, you must remember to replace it in the drive before
pressing the RETURN key! The solution: support the user's memory by reminding
them to "Replace the diskette in the floppy drive. Then press the
RETURN key."
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