Interpreting Usage Data

There is an awful lot of money spent on user interface research, carefully tracking what users do with an application and trying to find ways to improve based on that. It’s a shame that so much of it is wasted because the captured data is misinterpreted.

The Office 2007 Ribbon is a classic example of this, it was clear that Microsoft had real world data to back up their decisions about the Ribbon, they’d spent millions on it. Yet somehow it just didn’t seem right to me. Turns out at least Damien agrees with me. It turns out that despite the fact that usage data shows that users work in different modes, designing an interface that reflects those modes isn’t ideal.

Similarly, just because the most commonly used command is paste, doesn’t mean that you should add additional features to it, particularly if it requires adding more complex UI. From Andrew Robert’s Office UI Tidbits (UPDATE: That would be the internal blog but NetNewsWire remembers my password automatically. Sorry Andrew, on the plus side, possible improvements to paste options shouldn’t be too top secret…):

I am always blown away by how much people love our Word copy-and-paste support. I guess this is why.

We should think about how to improve it even further… such as having the paste options in a toolbar drop-down or having a funky floaty thing after a paste?

The connection seems obvious – if a feature is heavily used you should add extra functionality there because clearly users like using that function. The problem is, users like using that function as it exists now. Our Word copy-and-paste support is exceptionally popular because it just works, you don’t need to mess around with funky little floaty things and toolbar drop-downs – just hit control-V. What we should improve about our Word import is the fidelity of HTML import, how well we clean up the HTML and what we can do to avoid the user ever having to go through the Paste Special dialog to pick special pasting options. The thing is, if we’re doing our job properly, there shouldn’t be a need for funky floaty things or toolbar drop-downs, it should just work. Right now it pretty much does, but there’s always plenty of room for improvement.

I found it quite amusing when Andrew’s post came in the other night actually, because not two minutes earlier I’d had to explain to my Fiancé that you can just hit escape to get rid of that “annoying floating thing” that appears every time she pasted and got in her way. Word had done precisely what she wanted when she pasted and then ruined it by distracting her with pointless UI. Oh well.