All posts in User Experience

Do you use your back button?

By On January 27, 2009 In Firefox, User Experience With Comments Off on Do you use your back button? Permanent Link to Do you use your back button?Permalink

Patrick Dubroy suspects you don’t.

Today he spoke at Mozilla about his very interesting research and field studies regarding how people use tabs in Firefox. He found that people who don’t use tabs really aren’t using the back button much – his participants’ median was once per 50 clicks, and that the more tabs a user opens the less they use the back button.

This really gives voice to some of the thoughts I was having about how the back button and tabs are related. In a sense, the back button is allowing you to go back in history blindly – there’s no way (other than remembering) to know where pressing back will take you. Opening new pages in tabs, however, give you a visual indicator of where you’d been, and allows you to skip backwards in time as far as you need. It can also prevent procrastination by showing you what you were doing (“Right, I was answering an email before I opened 5 Wikipedia pages”).

Another problematic relation between tabs and the back button, as Patrick pointed out, is that your 10 open tabs may all have different back histories. How can you possibly be expected to remember all 10 histories? You can’t, and if you have 10 tabs you probably aren’t using back much as a result.

Another problem of the back button is that it doesn’t work with all media (such as Flash sites) and sucks with web applications (like Google documents). I’ve been trapped many times by accidentally pressing back while banking or using a form, only to find that my data has been lost. These sites tend to offer their own navigation methods.

So, what tabs and the back button have in common is that they are ways to manage browsing histories. Tabs may have made an improvement on the back button, but they still present some navigation limitations.

Give me my tools and back off

By On December 3, 2008 In User Experience With Comments Off on Give me my tools and back off Permanent Link to Give me my tools and back offPermalink

A good UI can balance a lot of contradictions. For instance, it should be discoverable – the user must be able to find that it’s there and what it does. But also, it should be invisible – a good UI steps aside and gives the user what he needs without making a big deal of itself.

Often, games get this balance very right. Partially that’s because the task is defined by the game itself, and partially because tutorials are something games do well and software does poorly.

Today’s thing-that-gets-it-right is a Auditorium, a silly Flash game with an elegant, discoverable UI that gives you exactly what you need and no more.

auditoriumui

In my opinion, good user experience should feel like playing a game. Your graphics editor, programming toolkit, and web browser should be able to mirror that intense concentration you feel stalking a kill in Halo. If that sounds far-fetched, think about how you work in a state of flow. Like in a game, you lose track of time and are focused on your task – not your tools. In flow, either you’ve mastered your tools, or your tools are well-designed, or both. I think of flow as the goal in many user experience problems. For every UI design decision you make, you can ask if it helps induce flow for your user: Does it make your user’s tasks easier? Are the user’s available choices clear? Does it present the right balance of freedom and direction?

Content-aware resizing knows what you want

By On October 13, 2008 In User Experience With Comments Off on Content-aware resizing knows what you want Permanent Link to Content-aware resizing knows what you wantPermalink

One of the biggest challenges of user experience design is predicting what the user wants. The best system possible is one that knows what you want completely and provides it before you ask. The worst system is one that thinks it knows what you want but is always wrong. An example of the former is sitting down to your computer in the morning and seeing the two new sites you always open first ready and loaded. An example of the latter is Clippy, the adaptive menus in Microsoft Office 2003, and any scene from the Jetson’s.

Two ways to predict what the user wants are by 1. knowing him better, and by 2. having more intelligent tools. A browser knows you go to Huffington Post and the New York Times every morning, because it sees your daily browsing habits and knows you’re liberal scum. But if a task is common and difficult, sometimes a more intelligent tool can be the fix.

Here’s a more intelligent tool to get excited about: content-aware image resizing in Photoshop CS4 (hat tip: Frederic Wenzel). This feature lets you resize an image while respecting its subject and complexity by scaling the non-complex, boring bits. Adobe has a promo video up, and here is a video from the Israeli researchers who thought of it first. This is a photo editing task which is normally quite difficult and tedious, and with better tools the user experience is massively improved.

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