Good Design Eliminates Distractions
Sometimes I wish software was a much more difficult medium to work with. Like freshly mixed asphalt, say, or hot molten metal. That, at least, would make people think twice about adding new bells and whistles to their software products.
Alas, software is an incredibly flexible medium, and it makes adding a new bell or whistle about as easy as falling off a log.
Producing an elegant design that enables only the vital core of vital customer tasks is much harder. At minimum, this approach requires much more restraint and foresight on the part of designers and implementers.
Examples of designs that cover only the “vital core”:
- My electric kettle has one obvious on/off-switch, one obvious place for water, and an auto-shutoff that makes a satisfying “click” rather than an annoying whistle shriek. It just works.
- My office desk is a big, clean slab of wood that’s a dream to write and type on. When I’ve removed the mounds of paper, letters, and other distractions, that is.
- The dashboard of my trusty 1997 Saab 900 SE is perfectly navigable even in traffic, noise, and lonely dark highways. Saab used to make planes… go figure.
All that is just to say that an essential part of good design is eliminating interruptions and distractions. I wrote about this recently, and just stumbled across a similar thoughtstream from Jon Udell: “…I’m exploring what it’s like to work in an environment where both desktop icons and application windows are hidden unless you really need them, in which case they’re easy to reveal.”
Cool.
Hard.
In 1999 I worked on a number of Windows desktop design projects with that same goal of eliminating clutter and increasing task focus. Some hints of it eventually shipped in Windows XP, but most of it didn’t make it much further than the drawing board. (Feel free to breathe a sigh of relief here. I am not the best UI designer in the world.)
Lessons learned:
- Creating a simple, elegant UI design for an extensive general-purpose system used by millions of people is inherently hard.
- It’s even harder when everyone creating and implementing the design — including yourself — has a culture of “building stuff” and “adding new killer features”. This is what happens by default when you hire lots of mathies and engineers… they’re wired that way. Sadly, after a certain point, adding new features simply buries the existing good work you’ve done. (Happily for the mathies and engineers though, they can derive significant gratification from simply building stuff, even if it’s impossible to use.)
- The constraint of backwards compatibility often makes good design even harder. “It has to work like it did before, or we’ll strand our existing customers”. OK… so how do we evolve? An existing customer base is both a blessing and a curse.
Fun topics for future exploration.
We now return you to your previous programming. Err… distractions. Whatever.
P.S. Design objective of Office 2007: “…make it easier for people to find and use the full range of features these applications provide. In addition, we wanted to preserve an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so they can spend more time and energy focused on their work.” So after decades spent adding features, the big new killer feature is simply the ability to find all of those already-built-in tools. Ironic. Cool. Hard.
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