When Simplicity Goes Too Far

I’ve long been a proponent of UI designers making decisions about what the best way to do something is instead of just providing configuration options to the user – after all, if you are a fully trained and experienced UI designer, shouldn’t you know better than your completely untrained users? Seeing some of the discussion going around about Joel’s criticism of the Windows shutdown menu, including Arno Gourdol’s comments on the Mac OS X shutdown options and they both seem to being taking it a little bit too far.

Joel:

Restart can be eliminated. 95% of the time you need this it’s because of an installation which prompted you to restart, anyway. For the other cases, you can just turn the power off and then turn it on again. Another option goes away. Less choice, less pain.

Arno:

I argued against including Restart, Shut Down and Sleep in the Apple menu. How often do you restart your computer, really, especially as a regular end user? On the very rare time when you need to do so, why not just Shut Down, then power up again?

Here’s a really good reason – that button you have to press to turn the computer back on again? It’s under the desk dammit! I don’t want to bend down and press it manually even if I only have to do it rarely. Even if it’s not under the desk1, I want to be able to tell my computer to restart and walk away, knowing that it will be ready when I come back.

Similarly, if I’m leaving my computer I want to be 100% confident that it’s not going to stay on and chew up a bunch of power, so I want to see it go to sleep before I walk away. That way, if a poorly behaving program refuses to let the computer sleep I won’t come back to find my computer still fully powered on after my two week vacation. You could argue that the sleep button shouldn’t be displayed for laptops where closing the lid puts the laptop to sleep and I’d agree with that, but it is required for desktop machines.

UI designers can’t just follow simple rules like “fewer options == better”, they have to actually understand the user’s mindset and what the user wants to achieve then provide the most intuitive, most efficient way for them to achieve that. Making the user bend down to press the power button leaves a bitter taste in their mouth even if they do it rarely, not letting them satisfy their paranoia about whether or not the computer will go to sleep just makes them wait around in front of their computer for 5 minutes watching it or worry about it after they’ve walked away.

Oh and for the record, iPods do have a way to turn them off, it’s just not obvious2 but it is mentioned in the manual and I know a number of people who religiously turn off their iPods whenever they stop using it despite my protests that it will take care of itself. iPods also have a restart function, actually quite a severe forced restart function, it’s just not obvious. This kind of model may actually work for OS X – put the sleep and restart functions only in the Apple menu, not in the confirm shutdown popup, but I don’t see the advantage to that since the popup is simple enough to quickly understand anyway.

1 – a lot of Apple machines can be powered on by pressing a key on the keyboard, though I don't think newer Macs include this functionality↩

2 – in fact it's so non-obvious that I keep forgetting what it is, something like holding down the button in the middle of the scroll wheel↩