[IxDA Discuss] Confirmation dialogs - the devil himself, or a necessary evil?

[Alan Cooper]

Billie,

  Thanks for the dialog.

"I'd say it's both..."

  Agreed. I use this analogy: interaction designers are like Yo-yo Ma
playing his cello on the ramp at SFO, with the jumbo jets taxiing by and
taking off on the nearby runway being the business/programming duopoly.
Regardless of Yo-yo's quality and volume, the noise of the jets
overwhelms. This doesn't detract from the virtuosity of his playing, it
just means the ambient noise problem dwarfs the musical one. While we
are solving the puzzle, they are winning because they own the code and
the money.

"I'm working in a constrained technology.... Fewer pixels ... less
memory ... "

  I've heard that same justification from programmers and business
people quite a bit. I don't buy it. I simply do not believe that there
is a shortage of pixels or memory. There is a shortage of respect for
humans. There is also a severe shortage of product development
expertise.

  For example, I want to buy a navigator for my new truck (because
pickups don't come with integral nav systems yet). All of the latest nav
devices are offering mp3 players, photo storage, texting, and voice
recognition. These are memory and pixel hog solutions looking for a
problem that doesn't exist, while ignoring the real problem that nav
systems are notoriously hard to use FOR NAVIGATION. The pixels and the
memory are there. They are being squandered by people who should not
have the authority to design products. I want a good nav system. An mp3
player is a nice-to-have, but ONLY after the nav problem is solved.* 

  Interaction design is product design. Product design is determining
what is needed to achieve the user's goals, and then marshalling the
technology to accomplish them. Techno-biznics make pre-emptive decisions
based on instinct, hearsay, and self-interest, then they tell us
user-advocates that "there isn't enough ______ to do that." It's like
saying that a piece of string is too short. Yes. It's too short because
some idiot cut it before they knew how long it needed to be.

  Funny, but all of the users of mobile devices that I have ever
observed fall into two distinct camps: Apologists and survivors. 

  Yes, we are often tasked with designing interactions within
pre-determined resource constraints. This burdens us with TWO
responsibilities: 1) inform the pre-determiners that they have screwed
up big time; and 2) make lemonade. It is my personal opinion that we
should devote about 75% of our time and energy to addressing
responsibility #1, and the remaining 25% to responsibility #2. If we
don't do this, it just means that *we* will be blamed for the inevitable
failure of the product, and the true perpetrators--the
pre-determiners--will be exonerated.

"...less contextual patience within the users' mental models for waiting
for operations that take their sweet time to talk to the server."

  I think you have the cart before the horse here. Humans haven't
changed much over the last hundred decades or so. They don't have any
less patience than they ever did. What has changed is our attitude that
technology is the given and that it is we humans who are/can/must
change. Operations that take their sweet time talking to the server may
be inevitable, but dropping that minor technical problem in the user's
lap is an indication of shitty design and implementation.

  Thanx,
  Alan

PS. "Shitty" as applied to design and implementation is a technical term
of great expressiveness and sophistication.

PPS. I kind of like that term, "business/programming duopoly". It echoes
Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military/industrial complex". The
military and industry are weak-kneed tyros compared to a gung-ho
programmer backed by a terrified MBA...

*Just for those of you who are designing in-car nav systems: I have used
nav systems for many years, and designed some, too. What is with the
landscape orientation of screens? The single biggest waste of pixels is
those wasted showing what is off to the sides instead of what is ahead;
where you are going. Simply changing the aspect ratio of nav screens to
portrait would make about a third of all pixels useful instead of
wasted.

__________
Cooper | design for a digital world
Alan Cooper
alan at cooper.com | www.cooper.com
__________ 
"Starbucks is selling a public gathering place. Coffee is the enabling
mechanism."-James Howard Kunstler
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Billie Mandel [mailto:Billie.Mandel at openwave.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 7:17 PM
To: Alan Cooper; ixd-discussion
Subject: RE: [IxDA Discuss] Confirmation dialogs - the devil himself, or
a necessary evil?

Alan -

Thanks for chiming in - I was hoping you would  :-)

You said:

"Good interaction design is much more of a power play between
programmers having fun playing with their toys and interaction designers
looking out for the needs of users than it is a puzzle for someone to
solve." 

I'd say it's both - in particular when designing in constrained
spaces/devices.  You're always going to have the
people/communication/negotiation piece in product development - that's
one of the things that makes my job, at least, fun and exciting.  

I do think that there is a "puzzle to be solved" aspect of designing
within technology constraints (such as what we've got in the mobile
space, with small screens, hardware predefinitions, weird technical
"what's under the hood-ness" like client/server models and memory
constraints, and operator requirements).  To me it's kind of like
writing sonnets - some of the beauty comes from the overall finesse of
the craft, and some of it comes from fitting artfully into that very
defined structure.

Which brings me to:
"Confirmation dialogs simply don't achieve the goals they are
asked to. Making everything undo-able does."

I totally agree.  However -- I'm working in a constrained technology
space that (in the words of a designer I interviewed recently) can be
compared to designing for the Atari. Fewer pixels with which to
gracefully warn users what's going to happen when they press button X,
less memory in which to cache things on the device and from which to
restore them if they are mistakenly deleted.  Plus, less contextual
patience within the users' mental models for waiting for operations that
take their sweet time to talk to the server.  

To me, at least, this is a very interesting set of problems.  How would
you say these type of constraints change the discussion?
  
Cheers, 
 - Billie


*   *    *    *    *   *   *  
Billie Mandel
Manager, User Experience Design & Research
OPENWAVE
billie.mandel at openwave.com