[IxDA Discuss] Leopard & Core animation ... Wired says it will change the desktop forever

[Chris Bernard]

Well, I'd love to hear Jared's thought on this (and suspect Don Norman has some good insights too) but I suspect anyone that measures 'satisfaction' of an overall experience in usability testing independent of the normal measures of time on task, level of completion, Level I, II, or III errors etc. probably does this by default. And satisfaction has a lot to do with pragmatic things that we can measure around function and context but also captures (albeit qualitatively) those fuzzy things like delight and esthetics.

In my early days at IBM I used to think that measuring satisfaction was a waste of time, thinking... "I don't care how satisfied they are! Can they complete the task? How many errors did they make?" But over time (and I'm being anecdotal) I came to realize that satisfaction is important, as important, as usability because our satisfaction is what ultimately fuels our overall impression of an interaction.

I've tested apps that work great but that users dislike because of the way they look or the fact I've perhaps made things easier but unfamiliar (anyone that's redesigned a green screen app. For experienced users has probably encountered the same challenges).

I've also tested apps that I know kind of suck but that score very highly on satisfaction because people simply enjoyed using the applications, warts and all.

I'm not sure we have a great set of processes to measure this stuff yet and my take away is that making things fun and delightful (designing for emotion as it were) seems to just make people feel better when they use something. But the fact that it can hide a multitude of sins or make a user feel great about an experience that could be better should not be lost on us either.

>From a IxD perspective I guess the best mental model I use for this today comes from Jon Maeda and focuses on the three keys he outlines in his book 'The Laws of Simplicity.' Which focus on...

AWAY (More appears less by simply moving it far, far away)

OPEN (Openness simplifies complexity)

POWER (Use less, gain more)

I could use the redesign of Office 2007 as an example here and it's a good one when we look at all the skill sets that use Office. The Ribbon and it's contextual tabs focus on the AWAY. We hide things you don't need to see depending on what you're doing and they reappear when you need them. We focus on the OPEN by using real time previews of changes that a user may make in the application versus making a user step through 10 steps in a dialog box (although we still have room for improvement). And finally, we focus on POWER by letting folks do in the 07 version of PowerPoint, Word or Excel that in the past would have required external and specialized applications.

I don't presume to be canonical here but if we look at things like Core Animation or WPF or (insert technology here) through this lens I think we can tailor roadmaps that guide the intelligence applications of what some of these new innovations can bring us.

When designers, or more often, developers ask me what can/should they do with WPF I usually suggest they go pick up a copy of Jenifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces first to get familiar with an interaction design vocabulary to provide a foundation for how to use WPF appropriately. I suspect and actually know that the concept of emotion in design is going to get a lot more play in MS research and I would expect that all the usual suspects are starting to think about this more. Some of the paradigms for how to best take advantage of this new technology haven't been well formed yet.

Chris Bernard
Microsoft
User Experience Evangelist
chris.bernard at microsoft.com
312.925.4095



Blog: www.designthinkingdigest.com
Design: www.microsoft.com/design
Tools: www.microsoft.com/expression

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." William Gibson


-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of pauric
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 11:55 AM
To: discuss at lists.interactiondesigners.com
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Leopard & Core animation ... Wired says it will change the desktop forever

Chris, there's no question Delight is good. I'm wondering how we
define the boundary lines between usable|cool|distracting

What usability test tools are there to appraise how quickly some of
this stuff gets old?

Its not hard to see how Core and similar technologies can immerse the
user in the interface, inducing a state of Flow more easily.

I am for it.  But I also have a hunch that as the interface becomes
more stylized, intricate, animated etc, you also narrow the range of
users who truly groove on it.

Results: low end novices get a little overwhelmed, high end power
users feel hindered.  And on the upper fringe as time goes on they
get increasingly frustrated with their singing/dancing windows.

Again, I'm for it, but what are the UI methodologies for knowing
when we've gone too far?  They probably exist, some may need
updating.. Jared?



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