Dad With Teeth

Whole Focus on Design

I went to the library last Saturday. Hardly an earth shaking event. It was raining and I was rushing back to my car. Now usually I am driving my mini-van (the one with 4 kid booster seats and a wheelbase so big I swear it has its own area code) but this night I was in the little car, a Ford Focus. What on earth does this have to do with design? I am so glad you asked. At six-one I find there are many objects not designed for me. The shower head in my bathroom comes to mind (perhaps the munchkins or Mayor McCheese lived there long ago.) As does the drinking fountain at my children’s school. But the one that gets me in a painful way is the dashboard on that Focus. I can’t seem to get into the car without banging my left knee. We are not talking a little rub. No, I mean a star-inducing, take-your-breath-away, primal scream, bend your kneecap all the way around kind of bump. Didn’t they have anyone tall test drive the thing when they were designing it? Or was that just too small of a demographic to be concerned about when the observational data said the design was broken. Convention says that we don’t design things that obstruct the path of the user. Whether that is the path of understanding, action, implementation, or just moving my big behind into the car. The edge of that dashboard is as much an impediment as cryptic icons, overly clever interfaces, and hot pink text on a black background.

Don Norman’s article about affordance, convention and design bring the lessons I learn from my dashboard to web design. Norman writes that affordances are relationships. “They exist naturally: they do not have to be visible, known, or desirable. They refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal.)” If the appearance of a device gives us critical clues for its proper operation, why is it that I can’t fit my knees into my car? I don’t think it is because I am not paying attention when I get in, although you would think after a while I would learn to enter slowly. No, I argue that the designers never stopped to really examine how people would use the dang thing. And most every web site I visit suffers the same critical flaw.

My bank’s web site is a secure site. I have to jump though numerous hoops to log in and review my financial data. That is all well and good. The process of logging in gives me a significant perception of security. But when I am done I can never find the icon or url that will log me out of the system. It is always buried in a sea of text somewhere on the right. I swear I spend 5 minutes thrashing around the site looking for a secure way to end my business. Just like Hotel California, I can enter any time I like, but I can never leave. Norman says that the art of the designer is to ensure that the desired, relevant actions are readily perceivable. If that is true, then someone at WaMoo should have their designer’s license revoked. I have been trained in a cultural and actual context that when I enter my car I get in on the left and use the steering wheel to control it. Using this logic, when I go to a site I should be able to quickly find the icons I need to navigate, even if it is to navigate away from it securely. The bank may believe it is good business to keep me there as long as possible, but the longer I am stuck there only increases my frustration and makes me an angry customer.

My essay this week seems to be more about my personal gripes and peeves, but there is hopefully something substantive about this rant. The synergy of communication and information comes from the experience of immersion. If we expect a visitor to our web site to come back, to have a desire to repeat their emotional and intellectual experience, then we need to insure that the process of exploring the site is a seamless journey. If they have to search for basic functions, if they have to disengage from the content and flail around for the next action, if they spend any time at all decoding the instructions, then we will have lost them. It is not about attention span, it is about the thoughtful logic of design and defining what we want them to carry away from their journey. We will be successful if we consider the context and relationship between the architecture, visual cues and most of all, content.

My knee still hurts.

posted by Drew Keller @ Monday, January 23, 2006