When what you see isn’t what you need 20 June, 2007
The paradox of interface design is that when it’s done well you shouldn’t notice it. Good interfaces seem natural because everything you want is to hand. (A principle described as what-you-see-is-what-you-need by software interface heavyweights Constantine & Lockwood.) It means that you can get on with what you’re trying to do rather than worrying about how to do it. When you don’t see what you need breakdowns happen; flow is broken and suddenly the interface is the problem.
Consider this screen from Amazon’s Marketplace service. The idea is to provide feedback on your purchase to help drive their reputation system. And it works well, up to a point. The designers even remind you of the information you need to complete the task in the ‘Questions to consider’ panel, but then don’t provide an interface to all of it! Look at the second question. It’s probably one of the most important things in any transaction: ‘Did the seller accurately describe the items?’. Yet, despite having this information in their database, Amazon expect you to to recall the original description from memory.
This constantly frustrates me because it makes it difficult to give accurate feedback; the cornerstone of any reputation system.
Here’s my revision. Simply adding the original description (by exposing a field in a database) gives me the information I need to properly rate the book purchase.
To know what people need in their software interfaces you have to appreciate how the software is being used; what the people using it are trying to achieve; and the information they need to get that job done. And having made the effort to understand what’s to be done you need to make sure that your application supports it.