âOne cannot not communicate. Because every behavior is a kind of communication, people who are aware of each other are constantly communicating. Any perceivable behavior, including the absence of action, has the potential to be interpreted by other people as having some meaning.â
FIGURE 1.1 A user interface is essentially a conversation between users and a product.
Imagine this typical UI design situation...
Imagine this: You are working in a small team developing a new software product, and you realize that having a great user experience is crucial for its success. Everyone on the team is a manager, developer, business analyst, or tester, but unfortunately, nobody on the team has a UI design background or any experience designing âuser-friendlyâ UI. You canât hire any design talent or one of those user experience (UX) design consultantsâthe budget is too tightâso you are on our own. (If you are like most readers, you shouldnât have to imagine too hard, because this situation is quite typical.)
But not to worryâBob and Alice are our best developers and have been assigned to the UI design. Although they donât have any UI design experience, they are smart and articulate, they have a strong command of the technology, and everyone on the team loves working with them. They have an excellent track record for getting things done.
You have watched Bob and Alice from a distance for the past few weeks and you are cautiously optimistic. After all, they have taken time to talk to everyone on the team, they have talked to customers and key stakeholders, they even did some site visits, and they have done lots of UI sketching on their white boards. You have heard them constantly use terms like user experience, user friendly, usability, intuitive, and simple. They frequently talk about having user empathy.
Right now, Bob and Alice are about to present their initial UI design proposal to the team for the first time. What do you expect to happen? I have two questions:
1. How good do you think their initial UI design will be?
2. How well do you think the meeting will go?
Please think these questions through before turning the page. Base your answers on your personal experience.
FIGURE 1.2 Bob and Alice presenting their UI design proposal to the team for the first time.
This is a purely hypothetical situation and there are no right or wrong answers, but here are my expectations based on my experience:
1. Their initial UI design wonât be very good. Even though Bob and Alice have gone through the motions, they will make the classic mistakes that everyone else makes, such as designing for themselves, considering only one solution, and ultimately focusing on technology and features instead of user goals and tasks. Their page designs will be confusing, overly complicated, and nonstandard. Frankly, the pages will look like they were designed by programmersâbecause they were.
2. The meeting itself will go quite well. Bob and Alice are smart and articulate, they have a strong command of the technology, and everyone on the team loves working with them. Their talent will show up in the meeting. They will do an excellent job of explaining (and defending) the design to the team, and their designs will make much more sense after they explain them. If anyone on the team objects to a questionable design decision, Bob and Alice will have a technology-based defense as to why it has to be that way.
Neither of these likely outcomes should be very surprising. After all, UI design is challenging, and Bob and Alice donât have any training or experience. But they have plenty of experience explaining their ideas in personâa lifetime of experience, in factâso that skill comes naturally.
What is surprising is that these two results are so different! If Bob and Alice can communicate the tasks to us effectively using English, why canât they communicate those tasks equally well using the language of UI? Arenât they ultimately communicating exactly the same thingâjust using a slightly different language? During the design review, you might have thought, âIf they just put what they said in the meeting directly in the UI, it would all make sense!â Good questionâwhy didnât they?
As humans, we are extraordinarily skilled at communicating to other people, because this is a skill that we have continuously developed throughout human civilization. Communication between people tends to:
⢠Be natural and friendly and use plain language.
⢠Be goal-oriented, results-oriented, and very purposeful; we carefully explain why people need to do things.
⢠Follow the personâs mental models and natural workflows (where the mental model is their interpretation of how a program works or how the task should be performed).
⢠Be very simple, getting right to the point.
When we communicate direc...