A Common Fallacy

Geir turns out to be the latest in a very long and prestigious line of folk to bring up a rather common fallacy that I find amusing:

I’d love to see a common UI for things like this, just like cars have a common UI for the basics Cars do have some things that are very much similar – they have a steering wheel and at least an accelerator and brake. That’s good and while you could define that as the basics as Geir was probably thinking, that’s about the same complexity as turning on a computer and maybe opening a program or two.

What I find so frustrating about this analogy is that cars are actually incredibly inconsistent. Most people feel awkward and uncertain when they start driving a new car because it just feels different to their old one.

Having moved over to England recently I can testify to this quite well.  I have to think before I can turn on the headlights – the switch is on the dashboard instead of twisting the end of the indicator. When I want to let someone in ahead of me I wind up washing my windscreen at them – the control to flash your headlights is on the opposite side, even though Australia and the UK both drive on the left. Want to open the bonnet? Good look finding that lever. I rented a car in the US with no handbrake and a strange fourth pedal on the floor – I’m told that was the footbrake that I should have been using every time I parked.

Off the top of your head – how do you set the time on your car radio? How do you set it on your neighbours car? Which side is the fuel cap on? Putting fuel in your car should be considered the basics and yet there’s no consistency, even if you ignore the question of which type of fuel the car takes. These days is hard to know which fuel is which because different chains call the different qualities of fuel different things.

When you get right down to it, everything in life has to be learnt. A related fallacy is that “everything after the nipple is learned behavior”. Babies don’t actually take to the nipple straight away – you have to teach them how.

On the other hand, I’d hate for anyone to point to this post and say “see we shouldn’t worry about our interface because it will always be hard to use”. My point is really that we should stop trying to live up to the standards in other fields, because frankly pretty much everything has major design flaws.  VCRs have come and been obsoleted, but noone ever found a way to make setting the time easy. TVs have millions of buttons that people don’t know how to use and pages and pages of menus that people accidentally make changes in that they can’t undo. Heck, most people still burn the toast fairly regularly.

As users we need to realize that everything has a learning and adjustment curve and stop expecting it to be dead simple. As interface designers and developers we need to understand that our interface is not and can not be perfectly intuitive, so we have to make the learning process as smooth as possible. That means good documentation to assist users at the right points. It means providing clear guidance to quickly get users past the suck threshold and make them feel like their getting somewhere. It doesn’t mean that we should remove every last complexity from our products, but we should remove complexity that doesn’t provide a net benefit. It means that our work will never be done and that we can’t depend on reusing the solutions from other fields because frankly their interfaces are just as bad as ours.