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What Comes After User-Friendly Design? (fastcodesign.com)
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, writing for FastCoDesign: "User-friendly" was coined in the late 1970s, when software developers were first designing interfaces that amateurs could use. In those early days, a friendly machine might mean one you could use without having to code. Forty years later, technology is hyper-optimized to increase the amount of time you spend with it, to collect data about how you use it, and to adapt to engage you even more. [...] The discussion around privacy, security, and transparency underscores a broader transformation in the typical role of the designer, as Khoi Vinh, principal designer at Adobe and frequent design writer on his own site, Subtraction, points out. So what does it mean to be friendly to users-er, people-today? Do we need a new way to talk about design that isn't necessarily friendly, but respectful? I talked to a range of designers about how we got here, and what comes next.
Computer Programmers (I'm looking at you microsoft) need to learn that these things are important:
1. Appropriate icons
2. Minimizing clicks to task completion
3. Common control placement
4. Self-explanatory menu trees
5. Consistent menu trees
I'll give you a good idea how NOT to do it. Windows 10 is a mashup of numerous operating systems. You'll find control panels from the original 95, and new 'tile' or web-page-like looks woven together. You'll find some with buttons you push, and others with highlighted words you need to click. You'll find important features like configuring the lock-screen not under right-click display like you would expect, but buried deep inside the user-accounts system. And clicking to find what you want has gotten so counter-intuitive that most people utilize the typing in the search box to pull things up now.
I could keep going on, but Windows 10 is a prime example of how non-user-friendly programs from tier 1 vendors have become. Photoshop is a right up there too.
"Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are."
Anyone know who said it first?
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
The most "user friendly" design is one that does the right thing every time.
The Right Thing!(tm) differs from person to person, and may even change for a single person as circumstances change.
For example, a menu-driven program in domain $FOO is great for a novice in that domain but as that novice turns into an expert in domain $FOO they will prefer using shortcuts and muscle memory for common tasks.
For novices an exploratory interface is great - it allows them to learn the limits of what can be done. For experts a command interface is better - they already know what can be done and the command interface allows them to apply muscle memory to get things done.
Anyway, this statement:
It will provide a clear workflow: top - bottom, left-right, corner to corner -- whatever, it will be CLEAR what to do first, next and to finish.
contradicts this statement
A good design will not railroad a user into one single path, one single process or one single methodology.
Finally...
I look forward to the day - at the rate of progress, in the dim and distant future, when user interfaces work like this. Without any "I have just crashed and wiped out all your work. OK" style messages,
I look forward to the day that user interface designers read "The design of everyday things" by Donald E. Norman and use it as a checklist against their designs before unleashing crap like Metro and Gnome 3 on the general public with the poor attitude of "You All Are Too Stupid To See The Greatness Of Our Design"(tm).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
From TFA:
It’s a balance any designer with a brief to design an effective, engaging experience has to strike: “You want people to spend money on your game and you want them to spend time in it, but there comes a point where that can become detrimental to what’s good for them and what’s healthy for them.”
If you're wondering whether or not your UI is good or bad for the user's mental health, the problem is that your design has already gone off the rails and into unethical territory.
You're not designing a UI to be good or effective, you're designing it to be manipulative. Worrying about whether that manipulation is good or bad for your users is merely distracting you from the root problem.
All software needs to have the equivalent of that 'List of Ingredients' you find on the side of a soup can. It should tell you exactly what data it collects, what kind of privacy you have, and how to switch it off. That information should be listed in a short, concise manner with a few icons that will make it easy to recognize. You should not have to wade through a 10 page legal document (after clicking though a dozen pages to even find that) in order to find out what it is doing with your information (assuming you understand cryptic legalese). The company should not be able to change the terms at the next update without throwing up a big 'red flag' and tell you exactly what they changed. Maybe we could even get some kind of standards body to come up with a 'Rating' from 1 to 10 about how intrusive a piece of software is (1 = saves your screen name, 10 = records the contents of your medicine cabinet) and make the software display it in the 'about box'. Adherence would be optional, but market pressures could drive out anyone who refuses to show the information.