9 ms·

Losing our product to button syndrome

128 points by hrishi 5y ago

draw_down 5y ago
thaumasiotes 5y ago
The OP doesn't actually describe what he thinks is wrong. > It isn't just us, here's Office 2003. > [image] > Here it is after the rebuild. > [image that is similar, but on a narrower screen] > To understand why - and to find a solution - the history of software is helpful. Step back. To understand why what? To find a solution to what?
- duxup 5y ago
  I found that confusing too, like I walked into the middle of an existing conversation.
- pjerem 5y ago
  And the screenshot isn’t even from MS Office 2003 but from … Kingsoft Office.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    I was curious so I searched Google. That specific image appears on the second row for me. I suspect some carelessness on the author's part and trust in Google's ability to return appropriate results. Though, to be fair to Google, the text underneath is "Download Microsoft Office 2003 Look...". The "..." expands to "-Like Kingsoft Office Suite - AskVG" when clicking on the image. So the text suggests that it is an appropriate image, and probably by some SEO and popularity metric it gets a place near the top in the results.
- duderific 5y ago
  Ironic that the OP commits the same sin as the bad examples that he's describing - namely, neglecting to take into account the user's potential lack of context for the issue at hand.
  - zmix 5y ago
    I thought so, too. Especially, since the Office 2007 image is so small, that I could not get anything out of it.
webel0 5y ago
On my iPhone 6 with safari I’m just seeing an error message: > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred. But from the other comments I get the impression that “button syndrome” has something to do with UX/accessibility. Tad ironic.
n8cpdx 5y ago
He missed one of Office’s key innovations - commands-on-selection, which is now available on the web app as well. It reinforces the story even better than the given examples and has been there since Office 2007. The web version just added search-for-command in the right-click menu as well, which is similarly powerful. This seems to be called the “mini toolbar”. Very hard to Google, easier to find through use. It is in Outlook for web now, too. The version in word is more powerful, especially when working with tables.
- LeonB 5y ago
  What is “commands-on-selection“ ? I googled it - but that only led back here!
  - kthejoker2 5y ago
    Eg when you select text, a table, etc. in Word it provides a toolbar of popular commands (font, layout, etc)
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    If you hover your cursor over certain commands in the ribbon, you'll see a preview of the action in the editing area. This was one of the major feature of Office 2007.
    - n8cpdx 5y ago
      That wasn’t the feature I was thinking of, but it was indeed one of Office 2007’s major innovations! That release got a lot of grief for folks used to menus, but it really was a major leap in UX. The discoverability advantages were huge. Another favorite: rich tooltips with images and text descriptions for commands. Sibling comment is a better description of what I was referring to, specifically floating the most common formatting commands next to the cursor on selection. It saves a mouse round trip to the ribbon.
CamperBob2 5y ago
But I like buttons. The more, the better. Complexity is more a function of depth than breadth. I don't trust your integrated search feature to understand what I want, and in any event, I rarely feel like playing a game of Zork to get my work done. Please use buttons, clearly labeled in English (if not the user's native language.) Looking at your screenshots, you pretty much had it right the first time.
- hrishi 5y ago
  I like buttons too. Quite a fair bit. But when you get to too many buttons, they become icons. Add that to the fact that all user tests we've done have fared better with search and more verbose interfaces, and I wonder if we are both of us far from the target user profile.
polyterative 5y ago
An excellent article
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  also a lot of fluff. Lenghty tirade about flight controls and linking a 1-hour flight lesson didn't help brevity/clarity.
  - jimjimjim 5y ago
    pour a drink, sit back and have a read
    - nine_k 5y ago
      Captain, it's Wednesday.
  - vulcan01 5y ago
    Brevity is not the only goal in writing. If the author had not provided an analogue in another field, it would not have been engaging.
- vba616 5y ago
  I'm not sure I saw the basic yin/yang tension explicitly described that I would like to see. Back in the 80s, the earliest Mac interface guidelines said something to the effect of "eschew modes". There were lots of reasons for that. Some argue that as more people are familiar with computers, it's reasonable for the standards of good design to change. But. Gigantic numbers of buttons are kind of a consquence of avoiding modes. I don't think I need to reiterate all the bad things about modes, because quite a few were mentioned in the article, including life and death situations with military aircraft. Quote: "segment our interface into a much larger number of smaller pages, each of which serves a specific function" - those are modes! There's no right answer, and the article covers a lot of the ground, but I think the end of it is unbalanced, because it's fundamentally about a duality with no resolution, where intelligent people have argued for the opposite of the final advice. There's nothing really wrong with the article, except it avoids the keyword that connects to significant history that shows both sides have merit. "Mode" is not used once. The older I get, the more depressing it is when I see someone rediscovering something without recognizing it.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
It's not just button syndrome. Lots of companies continuously fail their users in terms of just being to able to perform basic functionality while marketing themselves as world-changing, good-doing champions for people. Being a developer, I'm one of the main points of contact in my family whenever a relative can't figure out how to do something software-related, and boy has it been a sobering look into the future. I recently helped a relative file for unemployment verification through ID.me, which is a popular identity verification platform. My relative, who is not well off financially, had an old phone that didn't play nicely at all with the ID.me verification flow. I spent an hour trying to get my relative signed up and I never could get it to work. The site was barely mobile-friendly, and the photo upload process kept failing, which was a required step for verification. It was so Orwellian to see this kind of UX on a device that wasn't new (and of course, how is someone on unemployment expected to purchase a new phone?) I truly wonder how many people have starved because they didn't have access to devices that allowed them to collect their unemployment through this platform. It really kept me up that night.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  That isn't realistically fixable unless companies are really willing to invest a lot more in testing. Most companies don't even have any user testing for products beyond what devs do on their own machines.
  - democracy 5y ago
    How about devs who say "oh, its IE, its only 1% so we don't care"? What is the point of testing something that you know is not supported anyways?
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    I realize that, it just put the entire software industry into perspective for me. We are building products for users that can afford to interface with them, and even then, it's not a guarantee that you're gonna get a great experience. Here's to hoping that neither you or I ever become that irrelevant, because that doesn't look like a pretty existence to me.
teddyh 5y ago
If there were a science of user interaction, its second law could be called the Wide Angle Fallacy. When a disgusted user goes back to the designer saying, “Your system doesn’t perform the special function I need,” the designer’s ego is deeply affected. To regain the good graces of his customer—and to re-establish his self-esteem—the designer is likely to answer, “I can fix it in no time. I will just add another command for you.” Later, the same man will be seen at conventions, meetings and workshops, extolling the virtues of his system, the “power” of which can be measured by the great number of commands it can execute. I believe this is usually a fallacy and users should recognize it as such. — Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) chapter six, Obfuscatology (https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC)
- eitland 5y ago
  No software I can think of has been ruined for me because of getting too advanced. To particular pieces of software has lost a lot of their utility for me thanks to dumbification: - Google I have now given up. It was equally dumb as DDG when I last used it and the only reason I sometimes fell back to it was to see if it randomly provided a useful result. - Firefox is still the best for me but is a shadow of its former self. I'm eagerly waiting for a fork and on Mac I have already switched to Orion which has built in vertical tabs, can fix ctrl-tab and support both FF and Chrome extensions. (My main criteria is: 1. works great 2. not Chrome- or Chromium-based)
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    There's a distinction to be made between "capable but not overwhelming", "capable and overwhelming", "incapable but not overwhelming", and "incapable but still overwhelming". The first two can both describe advanced systems without dumbification, but the user experience is qualitatively different and can lead to wildly different outcomes when put into use. You can have an "advanced" (whatever it may mean in context) system which fits into the first two categories, which is very useful to remember. Something I like is command prompts in the style of emacs accessed via M-x and similar shortcuts (or in VS Code, which many more people are familiar with). These permit discovery of new commands and activation of commands without overwhelming the UI. They can also "teach" the user, by providing information like what the keyboard shortcut actually is for activating it. Contrast this with something I've seen in many desktop projects (especially ones targeting a smaller number of power users, versus a more public system distributed to a broader user base): menu hell. All those same commands are still there (maybe), but buried in menus with submenus with submenus. Even though a command may logically appear in multiple places, it probably only appears in one. They may not even appear in a logical place, but just a conventional one, like search commands showing up under "Edit".
luhn 5y ago
I think it's worth talking about a couple downsides of a search-based interface: Speed: Search-based puts a floor on how fast an interaction can be. "Button Syndrome" interfaces are a slow "hunt and peck" for new users, but experienced users can use them extremely fast, building up muscle memory so they don't even need to consciously think about the action they're taking. Imagine piloting an F35 with a search-based interface. Discoverability: Buttons make it explicit what functionality is offered by the product... somewhat. Users may not know exactly what a button does, but they can make an educated guess based on labeling and context, and it gives them a jumping off point to experiment with it or find it in the documentation. With search-base interfaces, there's no natural way for a user to discover functionality they aren't aware of. Worse, a user may remember a function exists but forget the terminology, flailing in the search box guessing different terms. This is not to say search-based interfaces are bad. There are mitigations to the downsides (the article mentions a few, like search suggestions), plenty of upsides to go along with it, and let's not pretend that button-based interfaces are all sunshine and rainbows. I only mean to say that these are things that should be considered. I think the broader takeaway of the article is: Always be thinking holistically. It's important to consider how your users interact with your product as a whole, not just the individual features. Also important to consider how different users of varying experience with the product and the domain will feel with the UI—Often features for "power users" come at the expense of new users or vice versa.
- ddingus 5y ago
  My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is. Each search is an opportunity to build experience needed to use search less. The buttons are there for those who want to run fast and or efficiently. Doing that well is a lot of work, but it also delivers high value. Going search only can be super lean, which has to be compelling. Everything costs something though, and the cost here is no user becomes adept. There is a permanently fairly high Ccost of interaction.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is. This is how MacOS X's help menu search box has worked for over a decade, and it's brilliant. Type in a search and it shows you every menu item that matches, and rolling down the list shows you live where each menu item is. I wish Spotlight search was similar - showing paths more readily, and making it easier to open the folder that contains the item that you want to look at.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I am not so sure that replacing physical fixed function buttons with context sensitive buttons in a fighter is really a good idea. If you look at the Navy, there have been several mishaps that have been blamed on poor electronic controls. In addition, and likely more importantly, a fighter pilot trains for hundreds of hours in their cockpit. They develop muscle memory. Having a button at the same place, with the same feel, that does the same thing, is likely vital when you are engaged with an enemy fighter and don't want any extraneous distractions. Instead, it seems you have the cockpit version of Apple's Touch Bar.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Heck, I can't even consistently hit the correct touchpad-buttons on my Honda's radio. I can't imagine trying to do the same in stressful combat situations (both physically - high Gs and speeds - and mentally).
corndoge 5y ago
I know this isn't the point of the article but the supposed F16 cockpit in this article is an F15 cockpit. The F16 has a sidestick, mfds and the canopy has no support arch.
- sklargh 5y ago
  Also I believe the F-35 still has a landing gear lever, I would never want my gear lever to be contextually defined. I want that visual cue as I scan my cockpit prior to landing.
- julianz 5y ago
  The screenshot is taken from the video talk he linked further up, and is mentioned as an F15 in that video, so it's a typo.
- hrishi 5y ago
  Good catch - fixed!
phillipcarter 5y ago
I think I want to agree with this article, but I found it a little confusing. In particular, I think it's strange to compare the F-16 with the F-35 when the former is regarded to be one of the best fighter jets ever made and the F-35 is infamous for being problematic. My understanding is that they are also different kinds of planes for different purposes, but at any rate, I struggle to focus on UX when there's that contextual elephant in the room.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > In particular, I think it's strange to compare the F-16 with the F-35 when the former is regarded to be one of the best fighter jets ever made and the F-35 is infamous for being problematic. My understanding is that they are also different kinds of planes for different purposes, but at any rate, I struggle to focus on UX when there's that contextual elephant in the room. Also bringing up fighter jets in general might not be the best comparison. A fighter pilot is about the farthest thing from a casual user of a fighter jet. My understanding is they're intensely dedicated to knowing how to operate it effectively, to the point of muscle-memorizing menu navigation button-presses to quickly perform different actions (e.g. memorizing something like the Konami Code to fire a particular type of missile). So they're almost certainly not like the users of whatever web app your building, so maybe it's not the best idea to let a photo of their controls inspire your UX. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    Or even if they chose a Tesla without knobs and buttons, people complain about that endlessly. Sure everything is in a screen which is flexible and easy to program, but nobody can figure out how to adjust the heat.
- bhk 5y ago
  I agree. Not having flown a fighter jet, myself, it's not clear to me which I would prefer. I can easily imagine problems with the "simpler" F-35 cockpit requiring the pilot to navigate a modal UI while navigating the aircraft.
codeptualize 5y ago
A lot of times too many buttons/UI is just lack of design. I can't say if that's the case here as well, but I've seen it many times. Usually well intentioned founders who know what they want to achieve, but fail to understand the subtleties of designing UI's and interaction. Or developers who sometimes lack the viewpoint of a "regular" user. In most cases hiring a good (interaction/ux) designer can solve this pretty quickly. Maybe a bit pretentious but it does kind of state it nicely: "To complicate is simple to simplify is complicated. Everybody is able to complicate. Only a few can simplify." - Bruno Munari
egypturnash 5y ago
I loathe "smart" interfaces that want to cram everything into a dynamically-adjusting control panel. Because what the programmer thinks I want to do is so frequently not what I actually want to do. Give me panels that I can open, close, and arrange as I see fit. Let me craft the interface of your complex, featureful program into something that matches what I need most often. Pick a simple set to expose to new users that covers the basics, sure, great idea. But let the skilled user tell the program exactly what sets of knobs they want to have handy.
- wruza 5y ago
  Every program needs windows/linux-like start menu and explorer/finder-like sidebar. This ui idiom is so successful and familiar that it's just stupid to not make it into a program. We need to stop designers who think only colors, fonts and transparent 40px frames.
thrower123 5y ago
The beauty of the Office 2003 type of UI is that is 100% user configurable. I haven't really felt in control of software since.
sundvor 5y ago
Author uses aircraft cockpits as an example of "improvement". I've been getting back into DCS recently, and one thing that's struck me with the A-10C (II) is just how incredibly resilient the entire design is. Sure there's a lot of work starting the aircraft and setting up systems etc, and there's an immense learning curve, however you have a staggering amount of redundancy in case of failures, in all levels of the aircraft design. As a consequence, pilots have been able to limp home ridiculously damaged planes, surviving to fight another day and go back to their children. Then there's the F-16. I've only just begun to scratch the surface of this one, the simulation is equally as amazing as the A-10C. This aircraft is likewise very manual, but if something goes wrong the pilot has immediate control; in the F-35 (from what I've read) he would be completely reliant on the glass/ computers working as intended / desired, with a level of complexity that makes Tesla's entire FSD program appear as basic calculus. That's perhaps a big tangent to computing, however I strongly feel that simplifying everything might take away more than you add. The best designs would combine quick, express usage functionality with expert panels for advanced, expert users/usage. This should be combined with a transparency of design that allows their users to understand the underpinnings.
- hrishi 5y ago
  That's a good point at the end, and where we'd like to be. Unfortunately dev time is always a finite resource, especially for an early-stage product. You need to pick one over the other - at least a little.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    > Unfortunately dev time is always a finite resource true, but usually not the limiting factor. more to the point; money is a finite resource if the product is intended to generate a profit.
960design 5y ago
Lost me at... this is an F16 ( cockpit was certainly NOT an F16 ).
hrishi 5y ago
Thanks for all the feedback! I've added a section at the end addressing as many as I can.
mro_name 5y ago
focus!
mgkimsal 5y ago
A friend of mine has been in software development for over 10 years - possibly closer to 20 but I'm not sure on that point. We chat a few times a month about work stuff, and routinely he will express amazement at being disappointed about something not working 'correctly'. "Well, the documentation says this takes key X, but it doesn't work if I send key X, I have to send Y" "This service seems to break when this JSON comes back down a second time". "I press this button and it shows it being clicked, but it just locks up for 5-10 seconds before finishing the click. That's a really bad user experience. I'm surprised companyX doesn't seem to understand that's confusing to people." And on and on. After... years of these observations, I pushed back a bit with "I'm surprised you continue to be surprised by any of this. You've worked in software for years now. You should probably be surprised that anything works and continues to work." A system continuing to work between various client/browser versions and system upgrades over a period of years, serving multitudes of users, with as little downtime and no data corruption is really... surprising in these modern times. It shouldn't be, but there's so many moving parts, so many players, that long functioning services do surprise me. A recent bank merger meant that two regional banks are merging. A recent mortgage refinance meant that this newly merged bank also bought my mortgage, and I'm supposed to make payments to them. Their system for setting up a mortgage payment is broken. Like.... errors in dev tools console, with relatively obvious root cause as in a field like CustomerId is referenced in another part of some code as CustomerID, and when I try to click X to move forward there's breaking JS code. This was a problem for at least 5 weeks that I know of, but from the little I could see via twitter and forums, weeks before that. There is 0 way of me contacting anyone who could even understand my issue in the first place, and that's a whole other topic. That they likely didn't have monitoring in place (I couldn't see any obvious tools such as sentry installed) is another story, but... I didn't chose this bank. I don't have a choice in using them (same with regional utility companies, etc).
dmalik 5y ago
Interesting article. It looks like the solution you came up with works well for your product which is the most important thing. I see a lot of products these days using more of a hybrid approach. Some of the most basic buttons to get new users used to the product and discovering what it can do. Then adding in a CMD/CTRL + K search menu for when users reach a better understanding of the product and just need to get shit done. There is a fine line between too basic and too advanced (depending on the audience for your product) and a challenging thing for most UXers is balancing new user onboarding against the power users of your product.

128 points by hrishi 5y ago

The OP doesn't actually describe what he thinks is wrong. > It isn't just us, here's Office 2003. > [image] > Here it is after the rebuild. > [image that is similar, but on a narrower screen] > To understand why - and to find a solution - the history of software is helpful. Step back. To understand why what? To find a solution to what?

duxup 5y ago
I found that confusing too, like I walked into the middle of an existing conversation.
pjerem 5y ago
And the screenshot isn’t even from MS Office 2003 but from … Kingsoft Office.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  I was curious so I searched Google. That specific image appears on the second row for me. I suspect some carelessness on the author's part and trust in Google's ability to return appropriate results. Though, to be fair to Google, the text underneath is "Download Microsoft Office 2003 Look...". The "..." expands to "-Like Kingsoft Office Suite - AskVG" when clicking on the image. So the text suggests that it is an appropriate image, and probably by some SEO and popularity metric it gets a place near the top in the results.
duderific 5y ago
Ironic that the OP commits the same sin as the bad examples that he's describing - namely, neglecting to take into account the user's potential lack of context for the issue at hand.
- zmix 5y ago
  I thought so, too. Especially, since the Office 2007 image is so small, that I could not get anything out of it.

webel0 5y ago

On my iPhone 6 with safari I’m just seeing an error message: > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred. But from the other comments I get the impression that “button syndrome” has something to do with UX/accessibility. Tad ironic.

n8cpdx 5y ago

He missed one of Office’s key innovations - commands-on-selection, which is now available on the web app as well. It reinforces the story even better than the given examples and has been there since Office 2007. The web version just added search-for-command in the right-click menu as well, which is similarly powerful. This seems to be called the “mini toolbar”. Very hard to Google, easier to find through use. It is in Outlook for web now, too. The version in word is more powerful, especially when working with tables.

LeonB 5y ago
What is “commands-on-selection“ ? I googled it - but that only led back here!
- kthejoker2 5y ago
  Eg when you select text, a table, etc. in Word it provides a toolbar of popular commands (font, layout, etc)
- wolpoli 5y ago
  If you hover your cursor over certain commands in the ribbon, you'll see a preview of the action in the editing area. This was one of the major feature of Office 2007.
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    That wasn’t the feature I was thinking of, but it was indeed one of Office 2007’s major innovations! That release got a lot of grief for folks used to menus, but it really was a major leap in UX. The discoverability advantages were huge. Another favorite: rich tooltips with images and text descriptions for commands. Sibling comment is a better description of what I was referring to, specifically floating the most common formatting commands next to the cursor on selection. It saves a mouse round trip to the ribbon.

CamperBob2 5y ago

But I like buttons. The more, the better. Complexity is more a function of depth than breadth. I don't trust your integrated search feature to understand what I want, and in any event, I rarely feel like playing a game of Zork to get my work done. Please use buttons, clearly labeled in English (if not the user's native language.) Looking at your screenshots, you pretty much had it right the first time.

hrishi 5y ago
I like buttons too. Quite a fair bit. But when you get to too many buttons, they become icons. Add that to the fact that all user tests we've done have fared better with search and more verbose interfaces, and I wonder if we are both of us far from the target user profile.

polyterative 5y ago

An excellent article

ricardobayes 5y ago
also a lot of fluff. Lenghty tirade about flight controls and linking a 1-hour flight lesson didn't help brevity/clarity.
- jimjimjim 5y ago
  pour a drink, sit back and have a read
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Captain, it's Wednesday.
- vulcan01 5y ago
  Brevity is not the only goal in writing. If the author had not provided an analogue in another field, it would not have been engaging.
vba616 5y ago
I'm not sure I saw the basic yin/yang tension explicitly described that I would like to see. Back in the 80s, the earliest Mac interface guidelines said something to the effect of "eschew modes". There were lots of reasons for that. Some argue that as more people are familiar with computers, it's reasonable for the standards of good design to change. But. Gigantic numbers of buttons are kind of a consquence of avoiding modes. I don't think I need to reiterate all the bad things about modes, because quite a few were mentioned in the article, including life and death situations with military aircraft. Quote: "segment our interface into a much larger number of smaller pages, each of which serves a specific function" - those are modes! There's no right answer, and the article covers a lot of the ground, but I think the end of it is unbalanced, because it's fundamentally about a duality with no resolution, where intelligent people have argued for the opposite of the final advice. There's nothing really wrong with the article, except it avoids the keyword that connects to significant history that shows both sides have merit. "Mode" is not used once. The older I get, the more depressing it is when I see someone rediscovering something without recognizing it.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

It's not just button syndrome. Lots of companies continuously fail their users in terms of just being to able to perform basic functionality while marketing themselves as world-changing, good-doing champions for people. Being a developer, I'm one of the main points of contact in my family whenever a relative can't figure out how to do something software-related, and boy has it been a sobering look into the future. I recently helped a relative file for unemployment verification through ID.me, which is a popular identity verification platform. My relative, who is not well off financially, had an old phone that didn't play nicely at all with the ID.me verification flow. I spent an hour trying to get my relative signed up and I never could get it to work. The site was barely mobile-friendly, and the photo upload process kept failing, which was a required step for verification. It was so Orwellian to see this kind of UX on a device that wasn't new (and of course, how is someone on unemployment expected to purchase a new phone?) I truly wonder how many people have starved because they didn't have access to devices that allowed them to collect their unemployment through this platform. It really kept me up that night.

MattGaiser 5y ago
That isn't realistically fixable unless companies are really willing to invest a lot more in testing. Most companies don't even have any user testing for products beyond what devs do on their own machines.
- democracy 5y ago
  How about devs who say "oh, its IE, its only 1% so we don't care"? What is the point of testing something that you know is not supported anyways?
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  I realize that, it just put the entire software industry into perspective for me. We are building products for users that can afford to interface with them, and even then, it's not a guarantee that you're gonna get a great experience. Here's to hoping that neither you or I ever become that irrelevant, because that doesn't look like a pretty existence to me.

teddyh 5y ago

If there were a science of user interaction, its second law could be called the Wide Angle Fallacy. When a disgusted user goes back to the designer saying, “Your system doesn’t perform the special function I need,” the designer’s ego is deeply affected. To regain the good graces of his customer—and to re-establish his self-esteem—the designer is likely to answer, “I can fix it in no time. I will just add another command for you.” Later, the same man will be seen at conventions, meetings and workshops, extolling the virtues of his system, the “power” of which can be measured by the great number of commands it can execute. I believe this is usually a fallacy and users should recognize it as such. — Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) chapter six, Obfuscatology (https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC)

eitland 5y ago
No software I can think of has been ruined for me because of getting too advanced. To particular pieces of software has lost a lot of their utility for me thanks to dumbification: - Google I have now given up. It was equally dumb as DDG when I last used it and the only reason I sometimes fell back to it was to see if it randomly provided a useful result. - Firefox is still the best for me but is a shadow of its former self. I'm eagerly waiting for a fork and on Mac I have already switched to Orion which has built in vertical tabs, can fix ctrl-tab and support both FF and Chrome extensions. (My main criteria is: 1. works great 2. not Chrome- or Chromium-based)
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  There's a distinction to be made between "capable but not overwhelming", "capable and overwhelming", "incapable but not overwhelming", and "incapable but still overwhelming". The first two can both describe advanced systems without dumbification, but the user experience is qualitatively different and can lead to wildly different outcomes when put into use. You can have an "advanced" (whatever it may mean in context) system which fits into the first two categories, which is very useful to remember. Something I like is command prompts in the style of emacs accessed via M-x and similar shortcuts (or in VS Code, which many more people are familiar with). These permit discovery of new commands and activation of commands without overwhelming the UI. They can also "teach" the user, by providing information like what the keyboard shortcut actually is for activating it. Contrast this with something I've seen in many desktop projects (especially ones targeting a smaller number of power users, versus a more public system distributed to a broader user base): menu hell. All those same commands are still there (maybe), but buried in menus with submenus with submenus. Even though a command may logically appear in multiple places, it probably only appears in one. They may not even appear in a logical place, but just a conventional one, like search commands showing up under "Edit".

luhn 5y ago

I think it's worth talking about a couple downsides of a search-based interface: Speed: Search-based puts a floor on how fast an interaction can be. "Button Syndrome" interfaces are a slow "hunt and peck" for new users, but experienced users can use them extremely fast, building up muscle memory so they don't even need to consciously think about the action they're taking. Imagine piloting an F35 with a search-based interface. Discoverability: Buttons make it explicit what functionality is offered by the product... somewhat. Users may not know exactly what a button does, but they can make an educated guess based on labeling and context, and it gives them a jumping off point to experiment with it or find it in the documentation. With search-base interfaces, there's no natural way for a user to discover functionality they aren't aware of. Worse, a user may remember a function exists but forget the terminology, flailing in the search box guessing different terms. This is not to say search-based interfaces are bad. There are mitigations to the downsides (the article mentions a few, like search suggestions), plenty of upsides to go along with it, and let's not pretend that button-based interfaces are all sunshine and rainbows. I only mean to say that these are things that should be considered. I think the broader takeaway of the article is: Always be thinking holistically. It's important to consider how your users interact with your product as a whole, not just the individual features. Also important to consider how different users of varying experience with the product and the domain will feel with the UI—Often features for "power users" come at the expense of new users or vice versa.

ddingus 5y ago
My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is. Each search is an opportunity to build experience needed to use search less. The buttons are there for those who want to run fast and or efficiently. Doing that well is a lot of work, but it also delivers high value. Going search only can be super lean, which has to be compelling. Everything costs something though, and the cost here is no user becomes adept. There is a permanently fairly high Ccost of interaction.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is. This is how MacOS X's help menu search box has worked for over a decade, and it's brilliant. Type in a search and it shows you every menu item that matches, and rolling down the list shows you live where each menu item is. I wish Spotlight search was similar - showing paths more readily, and making it easier to open the folder that contains the item that you want to look at.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

I am not so sure that replacing physical fixed function buttons with context sensitive buttons in a fighter is really a good idea. If you look at the Navy, there have been several mishaps that have been blamed on poor electronic controls. In addition, and likely more importantly, a fighter pilot trains for hundreds of hours in their cockpit. They develop muscle memory. Having a button at the same place, with the same feel, that does the same thing, is likely vital when you are engaged with an enemy fighter and don't want any extraneous distractions. Instead, it seems you have the cockpit version of Apple's Touch Bar.

alistairSH 5y ago
Heck, I can't even consistently hit the correct touchpad-buttons on my Honda's radio. I can't imagine trying to do the same in stressful combat situations (both physically - high Gs and speeds - and mentally).

corndoge 5y ago

I know this isn't the point of the article but the supposed F16 cockpit in this article is an F15 cockpit. The F16 has a sidestick, mfds and the canopy has no support arch.

sklargh 5y ago
Also I believe the F-35 still has a landing gear lever, I would never want my gear lever to be contextually defined. I want that visual cue as I scan my cockpit prior to landing.
julianz 5y ago
The screenshot is taken from the video talk he linked further up, and is mentioned as an F15 in that video, so it's a typo.
hrishi 5y ago
Good catch - fixed!

phillipcarter 5y ago

I think I want to agree with this article, but I found it a little confusing. In particular, I think it's strange to compare the F-16 with the F-35 when the former is regarded to be one of the best fighter jets ever made and the F-35 is infamous for being problematic. My understanding is that they are also different kinds of planes for different purposes, but at any rate, I struggle to focus on UX when there's that contextual elephant in the room.

tablespoon 5y ago
> In particular, I think it's strange to compare the F-16 with the F-35 when the former is regarded to be one of the best fighter jets ever made and the F-35 is infamous for being problematic. My understanding is that they are also different kinds of planes for different purposes, but at any rate, I struggle to focus on UX when there's that contextual elephant in the room. Also bringing up fighter jets in general might not be the best comparison. A fighter pilot is about the farthest thing from a casual user of a fighter jet. My understanding is they're intensely dedicated to knowing how to operate it effectively, to the point of muscle-memorizing menu navigation button-presses to quickly perform different actions (e.g. memorizing something like the Konami Code to fire a particular type of missile). So they're almost certainly not like the users of whatever web app your building, so maybe it's not the best idea to let a photo of their controls inspire your UX. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Or even if they chose a Tesla without knobs and buttons, people complain about that endlessly. Sure everything is in a screen which is flexible and easy to program, but nobody can figure out how to adjust the heat.
bhk 5y ago
I agree. Not having flown a fighter jet, myself, it's not clear to me which I would prefer. I can easily imagine problems with the "simpler" F-35 cockpit requiring the pilot to navigate a modal UI while navigating the aircraft.

codeptualize 5y ago

A lot of times too many buttons/UI is just lack of design. I can't say if that's the case here as well, but I've seen it many times. Usually well intentioned founders who know what they want to achieve, but fail to understand the subtleties of designing UI's and interaction. Or developers who sometimes lack the viewpoint of a "regular" user. In most cases hiring a good (interaction/ux) designer can solve this pretty quickly. Maybe a bit pretentious but it does kind of state it nicely: "To complicate is simple to simplify is complicated. Everybody is able to complicate. Only a few can simplify." - Bruno Munari

egypturnash 5y ago

I loathe "smart" interfaces that want to cram everything into a dynamically-adjusting control panel. Because what the programmer thinks I want to do is so frequently not what I actually want to do. Give me panels that I can open, close, and arrange as I see fit. Let me craft the interface of your complex, featureful program into something that matches what I need most often. Pick a simple set to expose to new users that covers the basics, sure, great idea. But let the skilled user tell the program exactly what sets of knobs they want to have handy.

wruza 5y ago
Every program needs windows/linux-like start menu and explorer/finder-like sidebar. This ui idiom is so successful and familiar that it's just stupid to not make it into a program. We need to stop designers who think only colors, fonts and transparent 40px frames.

thrower123 5y ago

The beauty of the Office 2003 type of UI is that is 100% user configurable. I haven't really felt in control of software since.

sundvor 5y ago

Author uses aircraft cockpits as an example of "improvement". I've been getting back into DCS recently, and one thing that's struck me with the A-10C (II) is just how incredibly resilient the entire design is. Sure there's a lot of work starting the aircraft and setting up systems etc, and there's an immense learning curve, however you have a staggering amount of redundancy in case of failures, in all levels of the aircraft design. As a consequence, pilots have been able to limp home ridiculously damaged planes, surviving to fight another day and go back to their children. Then there's the F-16. I've only just begun to scratch the surface of this one, the simulation is equally as amazing as the A-10C. This aircraft is likewise very manual, but if something goes wrong the pilot has immediate control; in the F-35 (from what I've read) he would be completely reliant on the glass/ computers working as intended / desired, with a level of complexity that makes Tesla's entire FSD program appear as basic calculus. That's perhaps a big tangent to computing, however I strongly feel that simplifying everything might take away more than you add. The best designs would combine quick, express usage functionality with expert panels for advanced, expert users/usage. This should be combined with a transparency of design that allows their users to understand the underpinnings.

hrishi 5y ago
That's a good point at the end, and where we'd like to be. Unfortunately dev time is always a finite resource, especially for an early-stage product. You need to pick one over the other - at least a little.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  > Unfortunately dev time is always a finite resource true, but usually not the limiting factor. more to the point; money is a finite resource if the product is intended to generate a profit.

960design 5y ago

Lost me at... this is an F16 ( cockpit was certainly NOT an F16 ).

hrishi 5y ago

Thanks for all the feedback! I've added a section at the end addressing as many as I can.

mro_name 5y ago

focus!

mgkimsal 5y ago

A friend of mine has been in software development for over 10 years - possibly closer to 20 but I'm not sure on that point. We chat a few times a month about work stuff, and routinely he will express amazement at being disappointed about something not working 'correctly'. "Well, the documentation says this takes key X, but it doesn't work if I send key X, I have to send Y" "This service seems to break when this JSON comes back down a second time". "I press this button and it shows it being clicked, but it just locks up for 5-10 seconds before finishing the click. That's a really bad user experience. I'm surprised companyX doesn't seem to understand that's confusing to people." And on and on. After... years of these observations, I pushed back a bit with "I'm surprised you continue to be surprised by any of this. You've worked in software for years now. You should probably be surprised that anything works and continues to work." A system continuing to work between various client/browser versions and system upgrades over a period of years, serving multitudes of users, with as little downtime and no data corruption is really... surprising in these modern times. It shouldn't be, but there's so many moving parts, so many players, that long functioning services do surprise me. A recent bank merger meant that two regional banks are merging. A recent mortgage refinance meant that this newly merged bank also bought my mortgage, and I'm supposed to make payments to them. Their system for setting up a mortgage payment is broken. Like.... errors in dev tools console, with relatively obvious root cause as in a field like CustomerId is referenced in another part of some code as CustomerID, and when I try to click X to move forward there's breaking JS code. This was a problem for at least 5 weeks that I know of, but from the little I could see via twitter and forums, weeks before that. There is 0 way of me contacting anyone who could even understand my issue in the first place, and that's a whole other topic. That they likely didn't have monitoring in place (I couldn't see any obvious tools such as sentry installed) is another story, but... I didn't chose this bank. I don't have a choice in using them (same with regional utility companies, etc).

dmalik 5y ago

Interesting article. It looks like the solution you came up with works well for your product which is the most important thing. I see a lot of products these days using more of a hybrid approach. Some of the most basic buttons to get new users used to the product and discovering what it can do. Then adding in a CMD/CTRL + K search menu for when users reach a better understanding of the product and just need to get shit done. There is a fine line between too basic and too advanced (depending on the audience for your product) and a challenging thing for most UXers is balancing new user onboarding against the power users of your product.