Is There Such a Thing as "Too User Friendly"?

rtphokie asks: "The story about the TiVo get-together along with some recent trials and tribulations rolling out a knowledge base along with the time I've spent recently helping my 80 year old grandfather with this VCR and TV has gotten me thinking about user interfaces and the elusive "user-friendly" label. When someone who thinks of themselves as 'non computer savvy' works with a gadget like TiVo and compains that it's 'too complicated', how should we react? Why are users immediately forgiven for not even taking the least amount of effort to look for a solution to their confusion in the manual. The tendency has always been to blame the interface and ultimately the engineers who designed it but isn't there a point where users have got to share some of the blame? Why do today's software and consumer electronics users expect to be able to fire up their new toy and magically have a complete understanding of how to use it?"

Comments

users

[Patrick13]

with all respect to your G'father, he has probably not operated enough electronic items to learn the "language" of electronic gadgets. The more he operates, the more likely he would intuitively understand how to use something.

This idea is discussed in Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things, which is a great book for UI people.

Also, I have never seen the Tivo's UI, so it could be poorly designed... ;)

How the VCR Illustrates the Geek Gap

[fm6]

Here's a conversation I have -- not a lot, but often enough. Some context: like a lot of Slashdotters, I'm the person everybody in my family, and a lot of their friends, turns to when they have a technical problem, from not being able to configure PC software, to programming an overdesigned digital watch with a poorly translated manual. I also explain things for a living (writing programming manuals), so people who are curious about basic details often ask me the "dumb questions" they're afraid to ask other geeks.

Now, every once in a while I get asked this question: how is it that a VCR can record a TV show when the TV isn't turned on? Yeah, I can hear the snickers. But I get this from a lot of basically intelligent people. And the frustrating thing is, I've never found an explanation that makes sense to the asker. To me it's obvious, "You see, there's two tuners, the TV has one, the VCR has one...." But the eyes just glaze over.

So the whole idea of Making Systems User Friendly is just plain bogus. It assumes that people can come to terms with any system if you just find the right methaphro for them to use. Doesn't work.

In the real world, there are three solutions to this problem:

1. You do a better job of explaining the basic concepts of the system to your users. But only a few really brilliant teachers seem to have much luck with this approach.
2. You build systems that do a good job of hiding the unfamiliar paradigm with a simpler paradigm ordinary people can wrap their minds around. But again, this takes a certain brilliance on the part of the designer, who has to be at home with both paradigms.
3. You take the Kuhnsian approach. That is, instead of trying to bridge the nerd-mundane gap, you wait for both sides to die off, to be replaced by big-thumbed folks who've grown up with the technolgy and have no trouble coming to terms with it.

Now, you might think that solution number 3 is basically a cop-out. And I'd agree. But I think it's the solution that will be implemented -- by default.