Why does user interface design fail ?
Filed Under Usability, Interface, UI, Design | Posted on February 12, 2008
Let’s take the scenario of a company striving to make a great product. They believe that they have a good development team, are well connected with potential consumers, and there is a ready market out there. And they are sufficiently knowledgeable that they want to do a cycle of user interface design and spend some amount of time in this process. Everything done, they release the product / web site and wait to see praise and purchases coming in; to their horror, the product does not take off as expected, and support staff get a lot of customer reports about poor interface. Why do cases like these happen ? Well, here are some possible reasons for such a thing happening:
1. A fundamental difference between the way interaction and information experts diverge instead of collaborating. In the case of the company, the interface designer worked in a silo, instead of spending a lot of time with the information workflow expert. While usability is obviously important, it’s far from the only consideration in designing a user experience. There are at least three aspects to sites: information, experience, and interaction – fact (or fiction), form, and function, if you will. User interface gurus tend to focus only on interaction, and the information architecture gurus tend to focus on information – and each tends to overlook the other two areas.
2. No single magic bullet to interface design. Expert literature offers many principles of good interface design, providing helpful guidelines for designers. However, even if every designer in a software development organization was well versed in these design principles, this would not be enough to ensure good interface design. Many of the available design principles are based on experts’ intuitions, rather than on hard data. What may work in one situation would not work in another, and it is for the interface designer to try out the ones that seem most suitable, and then test them out as to their individual benefits. Usually for any given design problem, they will come in direct conflict with each other, and there are no algorithms for making the trade-offs.
3. User interface design is a matter of compromise and tradeoff, for example, there i the need for powerful functionality, but within a simple, clear interface (seems a paradox in most cases). We want ease of use but also ease of learning. We want a system that is flexible but also one that provides good error handling. We strive for consistency across all aspects of the interface, but also to optimize individual operations. The interface designer finds him or herself constantly confronted with these kinds of conflicting goals, and with the expectation that the designer will be able to resolve all of them brilliantly. Well, sometimes these are not resolved.
4. Design by committee: In many cases, maybe to speed things up, or because influential stakeholders feel that they have the pulse of the customer, they get involved in the interface design process. Or many representatives from the team join in. In such cases, the interface designer has to take along all these people, and compromise; sometimes weakening the design.
5. In many many cases, designers operate in a vacuum, with little prior experience and no interaction with potential users to guide them. At best the interface designers are experienced and have learned from feedback from users of earlier systems. Even so, the technology changes so quickly that even experienced designers constantly confront new design possibilities they have no prior experience with, or have to work with changes technical possibilities that they are really not aware about.
6. Taking the interface designer’s work as gospel: The interface designer is not god. Even though the work looks good, it is always good to get the work evaluated by users in the form of usability testing.
7. Inexperienced designers: Just because a person is an interface designer does not automatically mean a high degree of skill in all areas. For example, if a web designer skilled in commercial web sites was asked to develop the interface for a web applet version of a media player, one can be sure that it will take some time to develop the necessary domain experience to be able to judge customer flows.
Poor user interface design can hide even the most powerful and useful Web sites or well engineered products from all but the most advanced and patient users. Developers have to consider seriously the issues of user interface implementation. A poor user interface will mean low usage of the site and its ultimate failure.
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