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

My theory

[cow_licker]

Do you know how your car works? Your fridge? The plane you fly on? Your phone? I program, so I consider my self technically savy, but I definitely have no idea (well I know the rough basics) and truthfully, I don't really care. I just want them to work. If I had to know the intimate details of every tool I used I wouldn't be able to get anything done.

This reminds me of certain responses from OSS programmers when told that grandpa can't use linux, 'He should learn how to use it' they say. Well he can build a house, live in the woods for years on his own. It's not like he's stupid. He just shouldn't be expected recompile his kernel or anything. Computers should be intuitive and operating systems transparent.

just my two cents.

Re:Mute topic

[macdaddy357]

If your VCR is flashing 12:00, you shouldn't touch a Tivo, or a computer. If there were stupid asylums, we would lock up anyone with a VCR flashing 12:00. As for Grandpa, why does he need these newfangled things anyway. He'll probably be happier without them. Don't complicate his life with a Tivo.

Read? Why the hell should I read?

[marxmarv]

Don't confuse simple to use with basic - just because something is easy to operate it doesn't mean that it's incapable of doing some complicated things.

Don't confuse complex with complicated. From m-w.com: COMPLEX suggests the unavoidable result of a necessary combining and does not imply a fault or failure <a complex recipe>. COMPLICATED applies to what offers great difficulty in understanding, solving, or explaining <complicated legal procedures>.

Many examples spring to mind but the telephone is top of my list. With my phone I can call half way around the world in just a few seconds - heck, even my two year-old nephew can.

The telephone isn't all that simple and yet more basic than you give it credit for. All a telephone does from the user point of view (advanced services aside for the moment) is accept a sequence of numbers that identifies another station somewhere in the world, and attempts to build a bidirectional circuit to that station from available resources. The only reason it appears to be simple is because most people consider phone numbers as very nearly opaque. If the person supplying you with that phone number didn't give you the area code, or you're in a country other than your own and don't know how to get onto the international network, it's not so simple anymore, is it?

But on to the point of my post. Difficulty of use of any piece of equipment is related to two design qualities. First, how many options is a user supplied with? Compare the Macintosh keyboard with the PC keyboard, a mechanical microwave timer with an electronic microwave timer, or a modern PBX station with a Bell System twelve-button POTS phone from the 1970s. A device that offers lots of possibilities right there on the front panel intimidates the inexperienced user and can disorient even the most seasoned. It is possible to offer functionality without disturbing the perception of simplicity by hiding it beneath a trapdoor, as some televisions and VCR's (and TiVo) do.

Many Americans being functionally illiterate, the second quality governing the perceived complexity of the user experience is the amount of reading a user must do to operate the device. Products with thick manuals firmly between the user and the functionality they want are an obvious target, but a more subtle yet influential problem is that some prompts, menu items, dialog boxes, etc. are too hard to (quickly) read. Products that talk too much tend to be perceived as complicated by the uninitiated and annoying by the initiated. Menu items should ideally be no more than one short, ideally monosyllabic, easily recognized word or phrase. Good examples are "Empty Trash", "Clean up", "Quit", "Back". Bad examples are "Empty Recycle Bin" (not so easily recognized, polysyllabic), "Open Web location..." (long, unclear, not so easily recognized: compare to "Go to..."). Menus should place more frequently used options in shallower places. RPN-style "Noun->Verb->Adverb" structures are good, as usually the user knows what they want to manipulate before they know how they want to manipulate it, but consistency is more important than the particular structure.

I am not a trained user experience professional, so take this advice with a salt shaker or two and all your wits.

-jhp