Author: Charles Field

What is UxD?

Charles Field, Friday, August 3, 2007 @ 9:59 am

A couple of weeks ago a sales presentation was being prepared in our New York office; it was primarily focussed on the problem at hand, but the presenter wanted to include a single slide as a cue to talk about  User Experience Design [UxD]. He emailed me and a couple of the principles asking for a description in a single frame.

I wrote something, designed two slides because I could not shoehorn it into one, various documents were thrown into the air, then we were all consumed by other work as the train moved on.

Now I am rethinking it. UxD is a fairly complex set of activities to describe, and there is no shortage of areas claimed by related disciplines. All of them are occurring in an area of rapid market development that happens to be highly valued by the societies we are in. Which is a recipe to attract passionate debate driven by financial rewards.

So is there a good way to describe it, or state it's value to a potential client in a single powerpoint slide? Assuming that no fly-ins, starbursts or windowshade rolls may be used in place of meaning, we will start with those old standbys - words:
________________________________________

Concise version:
User Experience Designers create structures for understanding and manipulating information, designing consistent contexts which encourage cumulative learning. In doing so they raise the bar from "being able to do something" to "being able to do something easily".

Their solutions go beyond code to model the most efficient and pleasing conceptual space that can be created within the constraints of time, budget & resources.
________________________________________

Verbose version:
User Experience Designers are typically employed on applications or sites with large amounts of features, complexity or information.

They create structures for understanding and manipulating information or parameters, designing consistent contexts which encourage cumulative learning.

They raise the bar from "being able to do something" to "being able to do something easily". As a starting point they conduct research to find:
_Who are the users?
_What are their goals?
_In what context will they use the product?

Then they use any modeling technique available to propose solutions that go beyond code to model the most most efficient and pleasing conceptual space that can be created within the constraints of time, budget & resources.
________________________________________

And this is just a starting point for discussion, and the slide itself is TBD. The concise version is hardly meant to be all encompassing, but it focuses on Pathfinders particular business goals. These are concentrated in application work, either in or out of a browser, and our communications tend to be directed toward fairly tech savvy folks. Interested in your comments.

Charles

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Color for Developers, part 3

Charles Field, Monday, June 11, 2007 @ 3:24 pm

Through a glass badly

"This is not a pipe."  R. Magritte

You are reading this on screen. It is not what I expected.

One of the biggest problems for any on-screen designer is the weird backlit medium we fish swim in. This is true if you are creating interfaces for browsers or desktop applications.

By now you are asking why, why does he continue to torture us with these vague allusions and puzzling suppositions. Well it is just my sick idea of fun, really, but here is a simple test. Make a pdf of your favorite picture of a human. Put it on a flash drive and walk around to a few of your colleagues computers and compare the different displays. Extra points can be scored in two ways:

1] try a PC and any other platform, Mac, SGI, Treo

2] try laptop, lcd and CRT screens. If you can still find a CRT screen, they are fading into the dust of time or the junkyards of third world countries as we speak.

Of course you will find that the image of Britney Spears moments after the haircut discloses an array of skull colors limited only by the number of screens it is displayed on.

Individual hairs may or may not resolve, and the level of contrast will have a happy variety as well. This is where you work. Every one of your users sees this differently.

So great, isn't that a big mess, can we please just ignore it? Well no, that isn't really playing well with others. What we need is a basic strategy for accommodating this tragic reality.

There are commercial solutions to calibration available, or most Adobe programs ship with basic calibration tools. These will help... but only you. There is no way of knowing if your users ever did this, and we know that asking is not a scalable strategy.

Unless you are in a highly controlled situation, in an industry where there is a financial benefit directly tied to color fidelity, you can bet that no one really cares.

So what is the solution?

1] Design it a bit crude. Don't expect someone's screen to display a reliable difference between zero, 10 and 20 percent black, that is too subtle. Try 0, 15 and 30

2] Test it. Test it some more. Don't beat it to death, but it can definitely be too subtle.

There we go. In a few short blogs the secrets of your universe revealed. You have grasped the remote from my hand, grasshopper, do not watch Jerry Springer with the powerful tools you have been given.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Color for Developers, part 2

Charles Field, Tuesday, June 5, 2007 @ 4:41 pm

Color in context

Many moons have swung by since our last talk, grasshopper, and by now you have had those tattoos revised and replaced more times than Angelina Jolie. I can only hope you have been as politically corrupt and personally shocking, really, she is a role model to so many.

Today we will talk about color and perception, then later we will do the sacrifice part... Right, let's start with Kasimir Malevich, who had strong opinions about color or the lack thereof and put his money, [or the people's money] where his brush was. Painted such fashion nuggets as "White on white" and "Black square". If you imagine what they look like in your mind, you will be darn close.

So what was on his mind? Why bother? There are a couple of reasons:

1] Cultural
He was a Supremacist in Russia in the early part of the last century and thought that painting couches and side-tables was hopelessly bourgeois.

2] Psychological
He wanted to defeat his own preconceptions and create something new; a kind of meta painting that was both free of objects and depicting pure emotion.

Well can color or it's absence do that? What strange and magical powers does it have? Vassily Kandinsky, one of Kasimirs drinking buddies, associated some very specific things with color - he claimed that certain colors elicited thoughts/memories/feelings of particular sounds and feelings and made them into a handy grid.

Most people make some basic and reliable associations with colors; black associates with night, death and designers clothing. Red means fire engines and radio flyer wagons. These are cultural associations, that effect how we perceive and interpret our world. A blue light on your dashboard is understood as a fairly passive status light. A yellow light, blinking rapidly, means the engine is probably about to seize.

When we use these colors in an interface, all of those associations are carried along with it. A complicating factor is the cultural context it is being read in. Many cultures have very different tolerances and preferences for color that western europeans; any short description of these differences will be reductive, but think of these references: Jamaican villages houses, Bollywood movies, Japanese packaging... Would those local tastes effect the design of an interface for those groups? I look forward to your comments. Leave a donation for the gods by the planter.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Que Multimedia, Part 3, Beyond Typography

Charles Field, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 @ 3:52 pm

As you might expect, I have a suggestion or two. Firstly, I would confirm my standing as a heretic by questioning the hegemony of typography. Put five designers in front of lattes and the one thing they will all agree on with mumbled nods is the importance of Typography. Of course I would too, but this reflexive assent masks a larger problem in how design is practiced and taught.

The design profession has been so deeply fractured in the last 15 years typography has remained one of the few common links between this new multiplicity of practitioners.

Well, for better or worse, the aesthetics of desktop and browser based applications use type in extremely limited ways that are an intersection between common system installed fonts and informative hierarchies. And common system fonts, consider Arial, Impact and Papyrus for a moment, leave much to be desired. However this is the palette of many desktop and browser based applications.

Often the more complex issues in these engagements are how to assemble, change and order vast amounts of information. Designers bring a vastly different focus to these activities than most developers. The developer concentrates on a micro level of specific code interactions to construct a working system while a user experience designer connects the user to a much more general picture. Factors that might be involved include business problems, a users cognitive interest/abilities and the the capabilities of the developers systems.

There are user research activity models, interface and task modeling considerations that have little to do with what anyone would describe as sophisticated print typography. Yet notions of hierarchy and the effect of symbols and composition are elemental to forming easily navigated tasks. So mere type skills will not be adequate; understanding interaction from a standpoint of task and capability is the core activity.

This means that the designer must have a comprehension of the basics of digital design history as well as what is current, and this is equally as trend driven as any part of print culture, in development terms.

I see this as the formation of the question, not an answer. What we do know is that the answer is a moving target, obfuscated by the claims of those who market digital culture. But the challenge to answer it is as real as any aspirations we have as providers of both sensible and innovative solutions.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Que Multimedia: Part 2, A Dilemma:

Charles Field, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 @ 3:50 pm

I share the responsibilities of hiring decisions for a small consultancy and being a design educator. Hiring new staff gives me one perspective on the state of education, and designing and delivering classes another.

Our consultancy delivers user experience design for applications; the participation of any kind of designer in these tasks is a relatively new thing, and is too often seen with some suspicion by both developers and financial officers in the organizations we consult with. The ability to convey the passion that is required for the work is an asset, and one beyond any discussion of teaching methodologies. That said, I see it as vitally important work that is rooted in a strong understanding of typographic hierarchies, information design and the mechanisms of interactivity.

Experience in the former role tells me that hiring a design graduate with less than 3 to 5 years experience is usually a mistake. Surprisingly, I have had better luck with geeky film or architecture grads. They tend to have stronger conceptual abilities.

We can deduce that design programs are non-functional in developing graduates capable of exploring and understanding these tasks. This is a simple and troubling assumption, particularly as I am complicit in the activity of educating them.

The organizers of the Schools of Thought conference have recognized a broader problem, inclusive of this issue, and have organized their spring conference around it.

http://superstove.blogs.com/schoolsofthoughts3/portal/index.html

My question is this. Is it presumptuous to expect Design Schools to graduate students with even a roadmap of the skills of information design, interactivity and typography? The problem lies less with graduate programs - where students should have some breadth of experience - but is pronounced in undergraduate education.

I hear no end of lip service; these are core values all lay claim too; yet the results are a vision of the emperors new clothes.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

The Iphone, why.

Charles Field, Saturday, January 20, 2007 @ 6:06 pm

Years ago I would go to conferences and people would hold up their Palm and lecture us on why it worked, the economy of means, the elegance. Time passed and the same people - usually people who had not actually participated in the design process of the particular device - would hold up an Ipod and preach the wonders of the clickwheel and how it had revolutionized design on the order of bread slicers or fishnet hose.

That they usually missed the point was irrelevant. The value of the Palm was that it was much smaller than a Newton, and much faster because Palm asked people what they actually used. And both of them had coherent software interfaces that easily synced the stuff on your desktop machine. That the Ipod made having many gigabytes of purloined music sort of marginally legitimate was not trivial, either.

So I wanted to get in on the ground floor of helping Apple hype the Ipod phone, because I am predicting that this will save me a significant amount in conference fees over the next two years.

Why does this phone elicit responses like Alice’s, a post or two back? Which I fully admit I shared as all the Mac addicts read the real time blogs from Macworld while jobs was unveiling it. Oh yeah, it is cool!

But what it makes such a big splash is a study in contrasts, and how the competition failed to develop and market something that people can feel affection for.

The current crop of cellphones are junk. There are so many difficult to use features that the cellphone companies market a special line of simple phones for the very young, very old or especially annoyed.

And the phone companies are completely oblivious to this resistance. Because of the way that cell phones are sold, really as a token of the extortionist contract with the service provider, there is a critical reduction that occurs to the feedback from the user. The design of the phones is passed on as a feature list and separated from everything else in the users existence. An elaborate, undoubtably extensively discussed system to create a broken wheel.

The worst thing about the current phones - and don’t get me wrong, Razors look cool and have great ads - is that if you lose it your numbers and all of the phone specific programming is gone. Unless you have a Trio or a Blackberry, you are just out of luck. But even Trio’s and Blackberries don’t have a good mp3/mp4 implementation. Much less the overwhelming cultural currency [read: cool] of the Ipod.

The Ipod advantage in both cases is it’s connection to the desktop.

For phone numbers, it leverages a much more powerful interface; your desktop through any Vcard compliant program. So you have all of your email addresses on the phone; and backed up. Think weeks of texting saved. Imagine what you will do with that time.

In terms of features, the new phone is configurable. Which means, to a luddite like me, that you can turn most of them off. Thankyouverymuch!

Not having to carry around my Ipod and my phone is probably the least of the advantages. Waiting until all the early adopters buy it and the price falls will be the hard part.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Wheels on a boat

Charles Field, Monday, January 8, 2007 @ 6:27 pm

A couple of days ago someone sent me a link to a flash catalog piece...

I have seen these kinds of things before.

And I always wonder why the idea gets repeated. I suspect it is because catalog based retailers see the Book as some kind of golden calf which is due irrational worship. The downfall is in the data-density difference between print and screen is the culprit; print holds so much more that the on screen imitation is irrelevant. The magnifying glass shows a smaller width than a column of type; not being able to read a full line makes multiple lines an instantly rejected experience, fomenting shockingly derisive thoughts on the part of a user.

I have seen this done better, maybe it was a Lands End version... It popped up a new window which was larger and had better controls.

The next question is what would make it work? Is there value to this format that drives otherwise knowledgeable adults to keep trying this metaphor?

If you assumed a 1024 x 768 user base, you would have a larger  beginning state. A very large magnifying glass, or better yet- zoom capabilities, would allow you to move into the page. Which returns us to the question of value.

What is it that retailers are seeking here? I think it is the experience of browsing in a lateral fashion and focussing in on some desirable or intriguing item... A simple but durable pleasure. And the notion of lateral non-hierarchical browsing is certainly a mainstay of the web.

As well, they are looking to leverage the page layout techniques that they find successful in print. This is where things break down; cluttered web pages, whether imitating print or not don’t tend to function very well for impulse surfing. If the page design were less dense with more whitespace you might be able to leverage one medium against the other. However this becomes a series of decisions as to how your product offering combine with the semantic codes connoted by the design choices this would require.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Que Multimedia?

Charles Field, Sunday, November 5, 2006 @ 2:21 pm

A local school recently asked me to teach a course in Multimedia. It is a first year grad course for people with little design context. Ordinarily I would have been interested in the school and it’s excellent program, yet I stumbled when I heard the term. Living in our Ajax enriched environment it struck me as an old school term, and wondered why it had faded from use.

After a bit of pondering, I came to the conclusion that it is a bit like carving trees out of wood. The metaphor is reversed. The soul in what we do is the interaction; multimedia is occaisionally part of the vessel.

Multimedia means Flash, cheesy little director games, tiny choppy video. Think of children’s CD-roms where low rent repitition is sort of a crash test stand-in for learning cognition. Multimedia means things that are difficult to sell and typically bring dissappointing responses when you do. And not usually worth producing except for massive media clients as they are expensive and cumbersome to update. These are not positive associations.

What is interesting is interaction design and the ability to synthesize actions and events into tighter groupings, both conceptually & physically - ideas like direct manipulation, contextual logic and coherent paths have utility; making it blink is just not that important.

I thought about for a bit, and realized that the suit didn’t fit. Back on the rack.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Web-o-lutions

Charles Field, Tuesday, October 17, 2006 @ 2:21 pm

We have seen many evolutions in website concepts and design over the years. I was talking to my colleague Matt Nolker and I noticed a book on his desk - it was the Internet Design Project book, edited by Liz Faber, published in 1998.

It showed a bunch of commercially marginal but visually impressive sites from the late nineties; back when people put a great deal of energy into brochure sites. And some of them were beautiful - let’s take Swoon as an example. Great graphics, idiosyncratic vernacular forms. Nice work, yet it just looks like a dead zone eight years later.

It made me realize that brochure sites are beyond dead. This is not an easy admission, as I have a couple languishing out in the electronic ether. The currency of websites now is their very currency. When does it get refreshed, what value can be packed up and taken away, or better yet consumed now? Immediacy is so important that aesthetics are largely irrelevant.

With the expectation of daily content, the visuals fall into two classes; an access point to an information nugget or a focussed experiment. For the everyday maintenance, static, highly mediated marketing images are pointless. Look at ten sites and email me if you find a photograph of a business person who isn’t a stockphoto. Look at 20 sites, and you will start to see the same photos recur.

What a site requires is a visual language that is extensible, and dare I say these words, fun to update.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Color For Developers, V1

Charles Field, Wednesday, June 7, 2006 @ 4:17 pm

It is time to open the temple.
The secrets of the art ones can finally be spoken. Having gone to a school that was too expensive then and ridiculously so now, I am a fully qualified shaman of these mysteries. Line up to the left of the Hibachi and keep the coals smoldering.

The great truth is an anthem that has rung true from the beginnings of byzantine painting to the abstract impressionists:

Warm colors advance, cool colors recede.

That is the first axis. Hue, the amount of color & it’s context are primary definitions of what will be perceived in which order.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Like a little saying to remember a musical scale, it is easy to recall. It happens to be the basis of hundreds years of painting explorations, which influenced a couple of formal design philosophies - what some people call Swiss Modernism & the International Style.

The real connector here is a Mazdaznanian cultist employed by the Bauhaus - Johannes Ittens. In a nutshell, he liked to draw mandalas and label them. Now we call them color wheels. His codifications of color theory have been disseminated by Bauhaus students who became teachers, and their students, globally since 1919.

Historical theatrics aside - I am trying to pad this because it is really pretty straightforward - warmer colors dominate your attention. But wait, there’s more.

The other axis is a cognitive one that is more elemental than color - our perception of contrast.

The highest point of contrast becomes a focus point as well.

This is strictly about tone; the interplay of light and dark. Shape and scale work in a different way; context is more important here. A good example would be stars - not that bright or large, but you can’t help but notice them.

So imagine two sliders, one that goes from warm to cool colors, one from high to low contrast. High contrast and warm colors converge at one end of the slider, but cool high contrast areas can dominate perception if the context is controlled.

Additionally, the scale is relative. In a very pastel environment, we are still biologically compelled to compare & discern. We will look for the warmer tones & highest available contrast.

So there you have. Welcome to priesthood, those tattoos will heal in a just few weeks, and you’ll be ready for the piercing.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Dietrich Kappe at CHI2, March 31

Charles Field, Thursday, June 1, 2006 @ 12:32 pm

It was a dark and stormy night on March 31, 2006, when Dietrich Kappe held the crowd spellbound with an exposition of Component GUI’s & Ajax. at the monthly meeting of CHI2.

The title  was “Back to the Future”. Dietrich mapped a history of paradigms - in the early nineties, the Browser was like a mars lander - you sent it out, it wandered around on the users desktop & sent back some cryptic messages which senior technologists claimed they had intended and understood. The context was that of pure unmitigated text, and even now, if you browse with a textual browser like lynx, most pages still work just fine, really.

Sites were based in a philosophy often referred to as CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Display. And like all new technologies - recall Gutenberg designing movable type to imitate blackletter script - they tended to imitate existing technologies. In this case the models ranged from Phd theses to early CD-Rom notions of multimedia.

In the last couple of years these models have evolved from document centric content management systems to an interactive single page interface. This is a dramatic shift in developers terms from reading an essentially static table to building a complex model and interacting with it. No longer a low res fanzine, the paradigm is that of an online application.

[This certainly maps to my own experience. The interesting problems in interactive design used to be large content sites; application design was seen as a very separate practice. Increasingly, applications are being designed to be delivered through browsers, which encourages convergence and invention in both areas.]

Dietrich went on to note a short history of User Interface:
_ Command line: mediated usage
_ GUI/WIMP: applications & early adopters
_ Web: sort of dumb reports
_ Rich clients: influenced by GUI/Wimp. The philosophical habits of the development community are pervasive; as people reuse GUI components, people also reuse GUI paradigms, which become a jumping off point for Rich Interaction Conventions. Jakob Neilson would claim this as truth.

Dietrich closed his remarks emphasizing the shift from a browser environment to display technology. The scenario he outlined reminded me of Oracles early notions of distributed computing, with the business rules on the server & the browser referencing them. From a development standpoint, it means a centralized maintenance location and a component UI of reusable widgets. Back to the future it is then, as this does have the ring of object oriented programming.

Full disclosure: As you may have guessed by the context of this review, I work with Dietrich at Pathfinder Associates. And often agree with him.

Topics:

User Experience Design User Experience Design

User Testing: Shadow Casting Real Use

Charles Field, Wednesday, May 31, 2006 @ 4:45 pm

User Testing is always good. It always yields some worthwhile and occasionally unexpected results. After the ego’s involved recover, they realize it is always better & cheaper to know sooner.

But User Testing is not perfect. If it has a fault, it is this: user testing an existing site is like watching life in a rear view mirror. It’s a reflection of a snippet of experience; a kind of shadow casting of real use.

Often, people evaluate what they have access to and make profound determinations on the basis of what they can see. This can be a very limited view of reality, and tends to reinforce that which has already been invented; to paraphrase a tautology: That which is good exists, that which exists may or may not be good, but it can be tracked within a millimeter of it’s existence.

So it has to be taken with a grain of salt. There are famous business cases of researching an existing context and making regrettable decisions. The research that Ford did as to whether or not they should have a drivers side rear door on the Windstar strongly indicated that consumers did not care. Dodge ignored thier research and added one, taking the market from Ford. What is the lesson? Once consumers saw it, and used it, they realized that it was a valuable addition. Another chapter in Ford's seemingly endless downfall.

To suggest that the fault is the user testing is not quite the whole story. The user testing counted what was known to be countable; what it cannot do is invent, or count what it cannot quantify. However, a mix of interviews, done by objective mediators, can reveal trends that designers & developers may not have considered or may have de-emphasized in thier process.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Maximizing Meetings:

Charles Field, Thursday, April 20, 2006 @ 7:11 pm

or 6 blind men and an elephant, in a phone conference..

We had a meeting a few days ago with a senior rep at one of our clients. This client was a trainer for the product we are doing some substantial revisions on - we learned more about it’s capabilities and the histories of use in 20 minutes from him than we could have in months of studying the app.

So what do you do with that information once you have it? What is the best way to cut that iceberg of information into usable pieces ?  Iceberg is the right term, because most of it is still hidden.

We decided to separate & each write our own version of the truth. Then to reconvene and compare/contrast/collect the ideas we heard while brainstorming more. This way we each define our individual perceptions, without the dynamics of personality minimizing contributions. We have tried this numerous times & found it highly effective for maximizing creative ideation.

And it is worth noting that information gathering at this phase is anything but linear. There are snippets of narrative, hard parameters that must be recognized, ideas that immediately strike you as being part of a larger solution. Capturing these, sorting them and keeping them available to the team is an ongoing challenge to which there are both simple & complex solutions. These can range from the utility of having a well designed directory with ongoing and meta class folders to full CMS solutions that enable sophisticated search. The solution most useful is determined by utility, cost & scale.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

CHI2 Town Panel

Charles Field, Sunday, April 9, 2006 @ 12:56 pm

On April 5 I was invited by Brian Maggi to speak with Mark FelcanSmith [Allstate] Frank Gruger [Motorola] & Jason Kunesh [Orbitz], at the Depaul Center at 1 East Jackson. Frank & Brian recorded the event for a podcast - I think elaborate mixing & sweetening is occurring as you read this.

Pre-talk dinner at the Exchequer loosened tongues & elicited shared histories with several of us having journeyed to the West Coast and/or back, and this became one of the first topics of the panel in terms of the opportunities available both here & there. My comments centered on the differences in the kinds of business endeavors which predicated a much more conservative environment here.

I find far less frivolous business ventures here - no pets.com or flash in the pan outfits like Friendster. What Chicago has is brick & mortar businesses who tend to be in a discovery phase with User Experience Design & HCI concerns; this means that there is vast opportunity. The logical corollary is a requirement for significant education; the panel agreed that IT departments were very much the gatekeepers here, and tended to be suspicious of anyone from outside their world-view. Luckily for us, there are many supportive currents in the media, both tech & general, that are helping open these doors.

Brian moderated, goaded & cajoled with great skill, keeping the conversation flowing. The structure of the event was simple Q & A, but as the panelists had many years of experience between them, stories & opinions were anything but lacking.

Adam Steele - in a moment of brilliant academic scheduling - brought his DePaul class. There were a couple of questions regarding what to show in an interview - I think the first one was whether you should show a book. YES, definitely was the resounding answer.

But what kind of book? The answer from the panel was unanimous - all of us wanted to see evidence of process. I recall it was Mark FelcanSmith who said show how you got there. I reinforced his comment by saying that I would rather see the process steps of three examples - problem statements, concept, iterations, solutions, results - than 15 unconnected finished pieces.

If you actually make it to an interview, then it gives both of you something worthwhile to talk about. How you developed an idea leas to methodology discussions of how you approach the stages of a process & how you deal with collaborative environments. UXD or HCI work is a team event - particularly as a junior, you are not likely to be handed a problem and told to come back with a solution in two days.

There will be Business Analysts, Developers, Senior designers & Clients working together to solve what is usually a complex series of problems. Work needs to be produced in a way that allows for comment, technical realities or epiphanies or creative market approaches. So the ability to work in stages is crucial.

Many other questions were asked & answered - I will link in the podcast when it appears. Thanks to Brian & the other panelists for an enjoyable evening & freely sharing their stories.

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User Experience Design User Experience Design

Ajax & the “Back” button III. To boldly go where they have just come from.

Charles Field, Sunday, April 9, 2006 @ 10:29 am

It starts with a simple question.

A question that didn’t seem relevant until a bunch of others had been decided. A question that too often catches us by surprise.

The client asks - “So what happens if I click the back button?”

Why would they ask? There are many reasons, but the primary is that it is a convention they already know. The back button is one of the most reliable & flexible controls in a browser. People hit the back button when:

_ They didn’t go where they meant too.
_ They didn’t find what they were looking for
_ The server is slow and the page isn’t loading
_ The network is slow and the page isn’t loading
_ Someone designed a huge flash file into the page & failed to warn the user, so they think the site is broken
_ Someone designed poorly tested javascript or other code into the page & it is crashing the browser

So this is something people use to solve multiple problems. The one case that usually comes up in a client meeting is not finding what you were looking for.

User are drawn to the back button like moths to a flame. We see this often in mirrored testing, it precipitates a greek chorus of UXD people behind the glass moaning and wringing thier hands.

Why do they love it so? It’s big. It’s always in the same place. It does something predictable, and usually pretty quickly. Designers should be so lucky to make something that users learn so well & trust so automatically.

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Software Development Software Development

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