Rob Goodlatte

Cleverness in software leads either to delight or frustration. Anticipating a user’s next action can add a certain magical quality to your product. However, if you anticipate incorrectly you’ll quickly piss users off. There’s a fine line between magical interfaces and annoying ones—the discriminator is the developer’s understanding of the context behind any specific action.

In other words, every interaction a user has with an interface is part of an overall goal—what he or she is trying to accomplish. You can be clever by anticipating and aiding the next interaction, but you must be sure you understand the user’s goals. Otherwise, your cleverness is getting in the way of your user—the interface becomes a barrier.

Only be clever when you’re sure of the user’s intent. If you guess at context, you make some goals easier to accomplish while making others more difficult. Guessing at context is a UI gamble, and it rarely pays off.

Delight

Wufoo, a small service enabling you to quickly build web forms, has the best registration form I’ve ever seen. When each field of the form has focus, a small bit of reminder text appears to the right. They anticipate confusion about what’s permitted in each field and immediately provide help. The interface isn’t cluttered with help notes for fields you’ve already filled out, and the help text is simple to ignore for users who know what they’re doing.

It’s clever, never gets in the way, and isn’t guessing at context.

Frustration

Microsoft Word spends a lot of processor cycles trying to be clever. Some of Word’s cleverness is welcomed. Spelling and grammar suggestions, for example, are great—I always want my words spelled correctly. But I find the auto-formatting feature an annoyance over 90% of the time. I don’t want my numbered lists auto-indented.

Auto-formatting makes an assumption about the document structure and page formatting a user is trying to create, but it makes that leap based on a tiny data set. To make it worse, the user is forced to hit undo to reject the auto formatting. That’s even more confusing, as the undo button typically reverses the last user action, not the last auto-action.

The difference between the delightfully clever features of Word and the frustrating ones is entirely due to context guessing. Spellcheck is great because it’s almost always appropriate, while auto-formatting is only appropriate for some user tasks.

Photo by Kamal H. under Creative Commons

 

1. beth October 25th at 1:46 pm

   Help and advanced options should always be treated as progressive enhancement in forms, otherwise they just obscure the path to completion.

2. Dan October 26th at 12:48 pm

   Wait one second. You weren’t a fan of Clippy?

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

   I was a huge fan of how he always seemed to think I was writing a letter.

3. Mike November 4th at 9:12 pm

   Haha. Clippy was the son of Satan.

   Great article.

4. Patrick Haney November 6th at 2:32 pm

   There’s some really great web form design out there and there’s some really awful web form design as well. Wufoo seems to do an amazing job with what seems like a simple thing, yet is usually not.

5. Jason Long December 4th at 3:45 pm

   Luke Wroblewski has a nice presentation on the topic of form design as well:

   http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?602

 

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