Why people don't think they need interface design

Firstly, I'm working from the premise that people don't think they need interface design. This is certainly my experience, but I accept that it's not universal. However, unless you're working in or with a company that's really educated about the importance of interfaces (and most of them are very big so you'll likely be in-house), you will be dealing mainly with people who see interface design as superfluous.

Why?

• Small companies in particular are loathe to spend money on things they think they can do themselves, and interface design falls squarely into that category.
• Developers accept that they are 'power users' but know that their feature list is amazing and their navigation is logical. It is very hard for a technical person to imagine not having their experience when sitting in front of a screen.
• Designers rightly feel that if it looks good it'll be easier to use. But they often forget what happens when you put the elements together and have a series of screens in a particular order, or the effect a certain rollover may have.
  

Put yourself in the position of someone at a SME, possibly even Director of a small company. You are a user yourself. You know what you like. Ergo, you can tell what works and what doesn't. You can easily steer the designer to make a great site that will work well.

Wrong.

Yes you're a user, yes you know what you like. But you don't know how the guy sitting opposite you likes to use a website, or the girl behind you. If you were to sit and watch the way they used their applications and searched for things on the web, you'd be amazed at the inefficient, wrong way they go about it. Why are they searching through the site map when they could just use the search bar? What are they going up to the menu bar for when that function is just on the context menu?

Everybody does things differently

If you want your interface to work, the first thing to do is provide options. After that, provide more options. You may have thought of a truly incredible time-saver, but still, give the old fuddy-duddies who don't want to learn your new technique the option.

Don't try to change everyone's habits, let them do what comes naturally. I can't stress this enough, but you often hear it: "We don't have time to fiddle with that bit, they can just do this, then click there to get it. They'll figure it out." To me, this is the death knell of a feature, and perhaps of the whole project.

Interaction Design vs. Usability Engineering

Well, what's the difference?

In a nutshell, Usability is about making the content of your web page/app/whatever easy for the user to access and take in. Interaction design is simply about taking care in the way the user will use your web page/app/whatever.

Personally I believe the differences are over-hyped and the time has come for people to take the strengths of both disciplines into the same philosophy. To explain what I mean here is a summary of what each term means:

Usability Engineering (UE) is a scientifically based school of engineering related to ergonomics; one of its basic premises is that you have information to relay to the user (be it instructions, news, updates on progress of the last action, etc). The user must be able to take this info in and then perform the next action necessary to their task. This must all be done efficiently, easily and without frustration.

Interaction Design (ID) is a loose term that people both with and without related qualifications use to describe what they do. It is the process of working out what a user will need to see and know at any stage while they are interacting with the application (or website, etc), then making sure they can do it in the way most appropriate.

The difference is that UE assumes that you want people to get hold of the information quickly, easily and without frustration, while ID takes account of 'soft' factors (like 'feel') that are often equally important to brand managers.

The strengths of UE are its origins; having a scientific basis and a documented history mean that Usability Engineers come armed to the teeth with data: what the human eye is capable of perceiving, what limits the average human working memory has, etc. In conjunction with this there are established aims, factors and metrics; you can get hard numbers out of a website to show exactly how it rates on any one of several scales. Usability professionals like to proceed by testing designs at each step; their data then informs their recommendations on how to proceed.

ID on the other hand is much more wooly; it totally encompasses UE in that Usability Engineering is a form of Interaction Design. In practice this is rarely seen to be the case and Interaction Designers will often proceed in designing a system based on personal experience, their feeling for the problem at hand and the brief they have in front of them. This generally leads to sites and applications that do not cater to as wide an audience, but gives a more comprehensive message to those that it reaches, often by using sound, animation and striking design.

As is probably clear if you've got this far, I don't subscribe to either methodology - or rather I subscribe to both. I think good, clear websites and systems are very important; they increasingly take up more of everyone's time and when people are frustrated by software the world is a worse place around them. However, the design-less, bland, text-based systems that so often come out of Usability Consultancies' studios cause me as much pain and anguish to use as ones with hard-to-read text.

I vote for clear, easy to navigate software, with obvious instructions and clear status information, all presented in a thoughtful, appropriately styled, interesting layout. Unless I am in a brochureware site or similar, where I am enjoying the feel of being taken on a journey and not knowing where I am or where I'm going.

I call myself an Interaction designer because I believe in usability and design - and I wish everyone else did. I vote for everything in moderation.

Introduction

What is this blog about?

"Interfaces" is the short answer. Anything to do with them, from speculation about new and exciting ones, to ranting and scientific discussions; from web 1.0 and 2.0 (!!) to Windows to OS X applications.

Basically anything to do with the way people interact with software, the good and the bad, and discussions about the industry(ies?) of 'Usability' and 'Interaction Design'.

Why am I writing it?

I don't really consider myself a good writer, so it's not really for the prose. I do rant and rave about interfaces to friends (which is pretty geeky, but I have some geeky friends!), and one of them suggested I put it all down in writing (I suspect he was trying to get me to shut up).

Anyway, I feel I have a few things to say and I'd be interested to hear what other people think about them. I don't think there are enough people who care enough about the important part of software development - the bit that people see and use.