The psychology of user interface (part III no freedom without boundaries)

There is no freedom without boundaries.

I read this from Bruce Tognazzini many years ago. It has always stuck in my head. Our politics is obsessed with the idea that freedom is good. The business community is obsessed with the idea that people need more choices in order to get exactly the thing they want. We have infinite sizes, flavors, colors, textures in almost everything we buy.

Freedom schmeedom

Too much choice is bad. In life, in politics, in products, in relationships, and indeed in user interfaces.

People need guidance. People need to be managed... told what to do. If you just hired a bunch of people and said lets make the best PIM in the world, and gave them no guidance, it would suck and fail. In the same way, when you provide a user interface, there is a balance between giving them enough options for them to feel comfortable, and not so many that they have no idea what to do next.

In the old days, this issue manifested itself in a different way than it does today. But this is not because we are smarter today, but because things generally suck so badly that we have a more limited set of ways to overwhelm the user. But somehow, designers still seem to figure out how to do it.

Photoshop. It sucks.

In prehistoric times, apps would have zillions of tools and no mechanism for understanding the context for using those tools. Photoshop is a good example of one of these prehistoric apps, because, from a UI perspective, Photoshop sucks. I know I know you probably love it. But that is just a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome. Trust me, it sucks.

In Photoshop you have a massive array of tools. There are no noobie level affordances. No tools jump out and tell you what you should be doing with them. You are just expected to memorize how stuff works. And damn it, you're gonna like it.

It is the epitome of blank slate design. You must stare at an empty page with a collection of nondescript tools and figure out how use it.

Of course Adobe is in a bit of a jail on this one because the high end users who spend a lot of money on Photoshop at this point know it like the back of their hand. And they *like* that is it hard. Job security. But this means Adobe is vulnerable to someone coming along and making a truly usable image manipulation program with perhaps fewer features.

So now what

Ok, so I know, you say, "my stuff is nothing like Photoshop".

No shit sherlock. If it was you probably would be on a beach somewhere instead of reading my blog. But there is still an important lesson here. I am dumbfounded by the number of websites and web applications that refuse to tell me what to do. If you have a website, I want you to tell me what is important. If you have an application, I want you to tell me what my first steps should be. I NEED HELP.

There is nothing worse than going to a website and spending five minutes and having no idea what the product they are selling is or how to find out. There is nothing worse than going to a web app and finding a sea of command options of seemingly equivalent importance. You see, if you don't tell me what to do or where to go, or what my first steps should be, I am lost to you. And I will just leave your page going, wow, that *really* sucked.