Invisible Inteferfaces
Matt sent this excellent post to me. And the first commenter linked back to this post on User Experience. The former post is really good, and it’s tied to the latter post, yet it is that one that I’m really responding to. jwz has an older rant on this as well.
I’ve been thinking for a long time that when the user notices something about the interface, then you haven’t designed a very good one. We’ve all been to web pages where the background makes the text unreadable. Or simply used an application that we just couldn’t figure out how to use. But I think that when the user thinks “Wow, that’s a nice color!” or “Where did they get that font?” then that developer also didn’t do his job right. The user noticed it and made her stop and think about it. You made the user respond to something that you didn’t want them to. I’m not a UI expert, but I know what annoys me. Lots of confusing option, colors that distract me from what I am trying to accomplish. If I have to stop to think about it, then it’s not that great of a design. I know what I like, too — something that only takes a few clicks and that I don’t need to look at the help file to initially figure out.
Another example of what people really like: not long ago I had to develop a web site for small group and I was told “lots of colors!” I had to think a while if it was in their best interest for me to design it “my way” or “their way”. Was I just being conceited and elitist? After some internal debate, I decided that they got me to do the design because of my knowledge and experience and all that was saying that they were wrong. So I developed a simple, sparse color scheme and left it as that.
When I demoed it, the room got a little quiet. Then someone spoke up, “Well, I wanted something with a little more color, but I kinda like the all-white, understated look.” So add this to your pile of evidence that people say they want inventive interfaces but they really want just simple, “I already know how to do this” type of interfaces.