KATI

Edward Tufte recently posted a video analysis of the iPhone interface on his website. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend taking a look.

My favorite part is when he offhandedly states, “The white frames are too thick and should be in gray and only a single pixel thick,” as he’s scrolling the thumbnail browser. I imagine Edward Tufte working as a design supervisor at Apple, watching over people’s shoulders, scolding young designers for not displaying enough information. I’m sure he would run a tight ship where every pixel would have a meaningful purpose.

Actually, I lied, my real favorite part is a term Tufte uses frequently in the video, “computer administrative debris”, usually as he’s noting the lack of it on the iPhone’s UI. That’s a great way to describe all the crap on our interfaces, the important stuff that enables users to perform complex tasks in a tiny two-dimensional workspace. Things like windows, menus, tabs, check boxes, toolbars, scroll bars, etc.

One of the challenges of interface design is to reduce computer administrative debris while maintaining a high standard of usability. Of course, the difficulty of this challenge is related to the complexity of the application. Pro apps are going to have more computer administrative debris than consumer apps simply because they have more features. The iPhone and Apple TV-type applications have it easy in this sense, because their users are mostly browsing content. The developers don’t often need to provide them with a context to adjust or create the content. Most desktop apps, on the other hand, are all about providing that context. Still, there are some things that desktop application developers can do to trim the amount of debris on their interfaces.

Top: Flying Meat’s consumer image editor, Acorn

Bottom: Adobe’s pro image editor, Photoshop

Features

As Jeff Atwood points out in his post, Every User Lies, users don’t actually use most of the features of the applications they buy. They want to, and might even tell you that they do, but they usually don’t. Jeff’s advice is good. Observe. Figure out what is critical for your users to get their work done and go from there. Also, don’t be afraid to say no to feature requests if you’re in the position to do so. Keeping the feature set streamlined is a simple way to reduce the amount of computer administrative debris your users will have to wade through to get a simple task done.

A good example of this is Flying Meat’s consumer image editor, Acorn. Pictured above are both Acorn and its comparable pro application, Adobe Photoshop. They’re both shown at their initial states, just after I opened an image. Acorn is clearly more approachable because there is less debris on the screen. Its feature set is not nearly as rich a Photoshop’s, but Acorn’s developer, Gus Mueller, knew that his users were not going to use all of those features anyway. He made a succinct feature list and because of that he is able to minimize computer administrative debris on his interface.

Organization

Pro and prosumer apps, like Apple’s Aperture, are in a constant state of struggle with computer administrative debris. They are the applications with the most features, but with some organization, even they manage improve their computer administrative debris to content ratio over time.

Top: Aperture 2
Bottom: Aperture 1.5.6

Pictured above are Apple’s Aperture 2, which came out this week, and its predecessor, Aperture 1.5.6. The Aperture 2 team did some re-organizing for this release. The most notable organizational improvement is the shifting of the Adjustments and Metadata widgets over to the source list area. The arrangement that we see in 1.5.6 is no longer possible. Users will never see the source list, adjustments, and metadata debris at the same time. The Aperture team understood that the users will never need to access more than one of these features at a time, so they made the decision to consolidate. Using tabs as an organizational tool, they reduced debris.

Directness

Tufte makes an important observation about the iPhone when he talks about computer administrative debris. For many features, the iPhone uses the content as the interface and users interact with it directly rather than through interface widgets. Again, the fact that users of the iPhone are mostly browsing makes it easier to do this, but there’s something to be learned from their model.

A simple example of letting the users interact directly with content to trim debris is drag and drop, something we’re all familiar with by now. By letting users either pick up items from one container and drag them into another or reorder items in a single container, we reduce the need for buttons or action menus. Less debris. Apple’s iMovie 08 boasts, “Drag-and-drop moviemaking”. In fact, Apple’s entire iLife and iWork repertoire is full of examples of interacting directly with content instead of through menus, buttons or text fields, greatly reducing the amount of computer administrative debris on their interfaces.

Apple’s Keynote

Keynote, pictured above, has a very clean interface with little debris because users interact directly with the interface representations of the content. Can your interaction model be more direct? When could users interact directly with content instead of through text fields or action menus? This is a tough one and often requires some creative coding, but its worth it.

Free of Debris (not really)

It’s not possible to completely eliminate widgets from a desktop application, but we have the tools we need to reduce the amount of unsightly and distracting computer administrative debris on our interface designs. With the introduction of gesture events and CALayers in Cocoa, the Mac developer’s toolbox is becoming more sophisticated and we have lots of room to be creative and innovative.

Users are also becoming more sophisticated and their expectations are evolving. It won’t be long until the mere sight of a pop up menu will be enough to make them quit an application and never open it again. Trust that they can handle an unorthodox interaction model. They might be liars, as Jeff Atwood points out, but they learn quick if they’re presented with a well thought out and executed design. The iPhone interface proves that and as Tufte notes over and over in his video, there is often no computer administrative debris in sight.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Research, Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.