“No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better.”
18 Feb 2009Interesting little article over on InfoQ talking about Alan Cooper’s book About Face.
Few key points:
- Design for Intermediates Users
- Use Tools that Help Beginners to Become Intermediates
- Less is More
- Design for the Probable, Provide for the Possible
- Eliminate Errors or Confirmation Dialogs
There’s an interesting closing comment discussing the need (or lack there of) for error or confirmation dialogs.
“Cooper notes that while they [error dialogs] are used to signal that something went wrong with the code, the user tends to interpret them as “I’ve done something wrong.” When users are told that they are wrong repeatedly, they start to hate your product”
I suspect there’s some truth behind the statement, however all things being equal, if your product is blowing up, there’s a good chance that users aren’t going to be happy campers anyways.
That being said, I agree that showing an error dialog with some cryptic exception message only decipherable by the originating author, is probably not doing anyone a favor.
Using the Java IDE IntelliJ as an example, it’s quite rare for a user to get an actual error dialog. Instead, there’s a little status icon in the corner that will blink red whenever there’s a problem. Clicking it will provide additional details with the option of submitting it back as a bug report.
It’s important to remember who the user is, and considering the article’s focus on differentiating between beginner, intermediate and expert users, this status icon approach is probably best suited for intermediate/expert users, and not beginners.