Amir Khella

Back when I was a research assistant at the Human Computer Interaction Lab in Maryland, a very interesting study was carried by Kent Norman on the acts of rage against computers. Kent surveyed people and asked them to “vent” their feelings and frustrations with their computers and software. The results showed that people screamed, swore, hit, and even killed their machines out of frustration and anger. For a full flavor of the acts of violence, follow the link to the full study below.

What was particularly interesting to me was the difference in opinions between Mac users and Windows users: Windows users blamed Microsoft for anything that goes wrong with their PC, even when it’s not Microsoft’s fault. On the other hand, Mac users forgave Apple even when it’s Apple’s fault. Back then, I wasn’t a Mac user (I’ve been a faithful PC user until Vista came out), so I grabbed a friend of mine who owned a Mac and asked him: “What’s so special about the Mac that makes you more forgiving?”.

“You know when you are driving back home through the rush hour traffic, after a long day at work, and your car suddenly gets rear ended by another driver. You stop your car, you go down and you’re ready to yell and fight with the other driver. And the other person gets off the car, and it’s this really hot chick, beautiful, well dressed, smiling at you with innocence and kindly apologizing. You can’t help but to smile back, tell her that it’s no big deal, get back in your car and drive back home. It may actually put you in a good mood that such a beautiful person has been nice to you today. That’s how I feel about my Mac!”

This person’s answer revealed to me the importance of a product’s look and behavior to users. It may even eclipse in importance its ability to function properly, or give users all what they need. We are mostly emotional creatures, and we like those who treat us well. Next time your product displays an error message, make sure it smiles, it apologizes, and qualifies as a hot chick

Related links:

• Study on computer rage
• Kent Norman
• The Human Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland

Over the previous couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Pluggd on creating the next user experience for their publishing platform. The product just came out of stealth mode yesterday and so far the buzz has been positive. Pluggd was also rebranded as Delve Networks and has now a more ambitious goal of indexing online videos and enable users to search inside them.

Photo Courtesy of TechCrunch

There has been many challenges in designing Delve’s media library, mostly around building the right workflow for filtering and tagging that allows publishers to quickly organize and find their media. But most importantly, we tried to create a design that people will love spending their time with. When we started tackling the challenge of creating the UI for the media library as an online asset manager, I looked at Delve’s competitors and used their products. The common feeling that I got from almost every one of them is that I am not having fun using their products, and I want to get the job done as fast as possible in order to leave it behind. And that was a big goal for us: To create an environment where people would like to stay and have fun working in, even when the task may not be fun in the first place. From the look and feel of the application, to streamlining tasks within the core UI components and avoiding pop-ups, users are presented with an interface that’s designed to keep them in the flow of their tasks and make it easy for them to go from one task to another.

One of the concepts that we introduced in the media library is establishing a bridge between the current task and the next one. A typical publisher workflow is to upload videos, tag them, edit their metadata, add videos to existing channels or new ones, edit the metadata on the channels then publish them. Some of these tasks are related to videos, and some are related to channels, hence it was intuitive to separate video management from channel management. But it was also important to provide a bridge that links the video management workflow to channel management. To create this bridge, a mini-channel list was inserted in the media library to enable users to create channels, add videos to them, and switch to the channels screen to manage the new channels and their content. The same panel that’s shown in mini-mode in the video screen is resized to its full height in the channels screen. This enables users to take a piece of the existing interface to the next task and proceed from a familiar ground.

Finally, the subtlety of the UI and the elegance of its colors (styled by Aaron Jasinski) achieves a nice degree of transparency, and almost sits quietly in the background, enabling users to focus on what’s most important to them: their media files.

Today, I stopped by the King County library to drop off some CDs and books, and noticed that they finally finished working on the new automated system for the book drop-off. I haven’t been there since they finished it, but I noticed whenever I drove by that there has been recently lines of people standing by these machines. Since this was a new behavior, I thought that these people are just excited about the new system and they are all checking it out.

When I reached the machine, it all made sense.

Here is how it works:

- You press a button for a little door to slide up, revealing a mechanical belt that’s ready to take your books.

- The images on the screen show you that you need to put your book in a certain way on the belt for the scanner to be able to scan it: Face up with barcode aligned to the right side of the door.

- Then you need to wait for a red light (that I could hardly see in the unusually sunny daylight - Probably a design decision based on average weather in the area) to turn green for me to be able to put the next book in there. If you attempt to put the book before the light turns green, the whole system will come to a halt until you remove that item.

It took me three trials to scan a book before I was approached by a gentleman, whom I thought was standing there to look at how people use the machine to be able to use it himself, who started showing me how to use the machine, taking my books from my hand and sliding them into the machine one at a time, orienting them the right way, and waiting for the dim green light to proceed.

I am not sure what prompted the library to make this change (I can imagine people claiming they dropped off books that were never received by the library), but I feel frustrated that such bad solution had to be pushed into people’s workflow.

This situation somehow reminded me of my first experience with office 97, when Clippy showed up to help me with the simple task of writing a letter.

The lessons:

1- Some problems are better stay unsolved, than to be solved the wrong way.

2- If your solution needs someone to teach users how to use it, then you may be introducing more problems than what you are trying to solve.