Nathanael Boehm (Canberra, Australia) web user interaction designer

Posted by Nathanael Boehm on February 17th, 2008 in General, User Experience

I’ve just finished reading a book “A Mind of its Own” by psychologist Cordelia Fine; a well-researched book backed up with lots of evidence from social psychology experiments and that will either leave you feeling in denial or a with slightly hurt ego … but one of the things she mentions in the book is the concept of schemas in the mind - existing frameworks of thought for a range of subjects that can be readily activated and mapped onto a thought to enhance and assist with the interpretation and processing of thought. I’m going somewhere with this … bear with me:

I was volunteered to do the takeaway dinner pick-up last night - if you must know it was chicken and cashew, dried sweet chilli beef, spring rolls and fried rice - and I was driving home with dinner on the back seat around the back of the Gungahlin Marketplace and came to a “T” intersection. Now typically in a “T” intersection it’s the drivers on the road that ends at the intersection who give way.

Not here. At this intersection they plan to eventually extend the road that crossed the one I was on - it’s also considered to be the higher priority of the two roads and therefore users of that road have right of way. Even though at the moment it’s just a “T” intersection. It catches you off guard. You know what a “T” intersection looks like, you know how it works … yet this contradicts the usual implementation of such an intersection and therefore causes confusion … and because we’re talking about moving vehicles it’s also a safety concern.

So anyway I realise this at the last moment, slow down, make sure it’s safe and keep going. Up to the next intersection. Oh, a roundabout … ok I know how these work, check to my right, yep all clear and in I cruise.

No. It’s not a roundabout. Well, it’s round - but it’s actually crossing a dual carriageway and is only shaped like a roundabout. Have to check your left too … which although it’s always good to look everywhere while driving, it’s not something you have to do on a roundabout because cars on the left give way. Not here. Another confusing intersection. Two in a row. What were the road designers thinking?

Not sure - but it got me thinking about some of the stuff I’ve been doing at work lately with interaction and user interface design and I’ve caught myself a few times over the past few months doing things and designing things that are confusing well-known interaction elements and processes. Things that we all learnt with Windows 3.1 and other early GUIs over a decade ago when we were 10, or 20 or 40 years old. Things that kids these days are now learning when they’re 5.

I’ve caught myself making things work like select boxes that don’t look like select boxes or links that don’t work like links should … or rather how users expect links to work. There’s no right or wrong way and I’ve come up with some funky ideas and while the design and interaction “works” if it confuses users by messing with well-known design and interaction elements then it’s bad news.

It’s bad enough making users learn new things let alone making them unlearn something because you’ve decided for some reason to mess with the schema behind that element of the design. They try and map their mental schema to that thing, finds it doesn’t fit, have to figure out why, generate a new one … and that makes cranky users. And you don’t need cranky users.

Update: Two days after writing this, Useit (Jakob Nielsen) published Top 10 Application Design Mistakes. The first mistake on the list is about Non-Standard GUI Controls, which I’ve covered in this blog post with some additional evidence and information. Good read!

Tags: design, gui, interactiondesign, ixd, psychology, schemas, ui, useit, web