Make Your User Interface Intuitive By Encouraging Experimentation

Posted by: Josh Walsh in User Experience.

The design industry is plagued with the misconception that product manuals are evil. These designers believe that your product should be intuitive enough to use without a manual.

While there is a certain truth to this, there are many viable reasons for product manuals to be used. There needs to be a certain level of competency that can be achieved without the manual.

A manual is never an excuse for poor design.

Your product should be designed to encourage people to experiment. That’s how people learn how your product works, and it is also how they discover advanced functionality.

For example, Google SketchUp encourages you to grab the basic 3D modeling tools and start playing around. The manual becomes necessary when you need to do something more advanced.

You cannot make every feature equally intuitive.

As software products grow, they typically become less usable. Complexity breeds usability problems. It’s impossible to add features to an application without making the interface more complex. We can mitigate this in a couple of ways:

1. Don’t build any features which aren’t absolutely necessary
2. Don’t give all interface elements equal weight.

The first item is what makes people love or hate 37 Signals applications. They are simple and intuitive, but lack advanced features. For that reason, they are able to have maximum control over their UI designs, and thus, have some of the most intuitive applications on the web.

The second item is what Microsoft fought against with the new release of MS Office. For years the number of buttons on our toolbars grew. Our menus were stuffed full of items we never used. Yet, they were given equal weight to those that we do use.

Microsoft had a number of innovations to solve this problem:

• Customizable Toolbars
• It learned which items you never used, and hid them.
• Eventually, the Ribbon Bar replaced the old toolbar paradigm.

Even with these problems, Microsoft Office was a success because their interface encouraged people to experiment and play.

When you first start Microsoft Word, you are given a blank document with a cursor. You can type, format text, insert images and more, all without reading the manual. When you get into more advanced options, like embedding documents or mail merge, you look up what you need in the manual.

Overwhelmingly Scary Interfaces

Sometimes we come across applications which do encourage us to play, but still frighten us. Photoshop is the classic example. They encourage us to play, but not in a real world context. You can easily start a new document and draw all over it, but when you need to really do something specific, you get scared.

Simple tasks, like changing text size, changing font colors, and image cropping can be scary to a new user. Let alone advanced image slicing tools and warping utilities.

Photoshop failed in making a sandbox to play in. Instead, they scare you with a blank slate.

The O’Reilly Publishing company has capitalized on this fear with their “Missing Manual” book series, which has become very popular.

Discover new features as you go

Music publishing software is dominated by two products: Finale, and Sibelius. Both encourage you to start composing by giving you an empty music staff, and simple tools to drop notes onto the staff. It keeps the spacing clean for you, encouraging you to continue playing.

Over time, you discover new ways to enter notes using a MIDI keyboard. While these features are much more efficient, the products encourage you to play the easy way until you discover them.

I encourage you to take a look at your interfaces and discover new ways for people to harmlessly experiment with them.