Evolution over Revolution
While I’m finally reading Raskin‘s master piece “The Humane Interface”, I came across an inspiring article. Like many of the people working on IT I’m always involved in duscussions that compare Mac versus Windows, or Apple versus Microsoft.
Being in the past mainly a Flash Developer I had to switch from Mac to PC many years ago because the big differences in the performances with that technology. In these years I enjoyed very good performances and the possibility to easily develop with different and new technologies (like J2ME, Palm OS and Flash itself) that otherwise would have been almost impossible. I left the mac soon after Mac OS X was released. I kept an eye on it from far, of course, appreciating the introduction of features like Expose and Spotlight. When few months ago though, I had to use a new I-Mac G5 to do some video editing in the office I was very disappointed from the slow responsiveness of its GUI due mainly by the fancy visual effects. Working on interactive media I reckon I’m quite sensible to these differences and those fancy effects seemed to me more annoying than inspiring. Are they that necessary?
More recently due to the growing pressure Microsoft is doing to partners about the usage of WPF, we had to do some tests in the office with Windows Vista. Probably feeling so backward comparing to Apple, Microsoft tried to animate everything to make it look cooler. Animations are cool – who could argue with that? – but as soon they get cranky and repetitive they became unavoidably A PAIN. We tried Vista on a brand new Dell with 512 MB video card, unfortunately not very good with the 3D (Nvidia Quadro NVS), and the performances were so bad that if the computer was mine I would have removed ALL the effects straight away, my masochist colleague instead is still using them. A better analysis has been done by John C. Welch and is the article I was mentioned before. Despite I’m still convinced about the slowness in OS X GUI, I like his comparison between the two systems using the example of Evolution versus Revolution. It’s clear that Microsoft wanted to do something new, unfortunately not necessarely better. Of course when we design the update of a product we have to keep in consideration the knowledge people have about its older versions, so starting from scratch is clearly never the way to go.
I wouldn’t post an obvious thing like this if yesterday Apple didn’t try to “revolutionate” the phone. Apple, in facts, tried to reinvent the phone using a fullscreen multi-touch display. I don’t want to go into the market issues, we know that cell phones’ success depends a lot from the providers and iPhone could have easily issues regarding that. It’s also nice sometimes being able to reply to the phone without having to look a screen maybe just feeling the buttons. There is no doubt that this jewel will make people talk a lot about and that many fans will do all possible to put hands on in. My concerns are about the fact that despite Apple definitely tried to make users lives easier, I noticed too much the attitude on revolutionate instead of evolving. It seems they tried to add the most wow factors features, like its scrolling and zoom with the multitouch screen, without necessary consider the usability issues. The inertia when scrolling is cool but I’m wondering if it would be faster to scroll it with a kind of scrollbar (only a swipe from top to down to scroll the whole list) or maybe studing the usage of more fingers for that interaction, and others, to speed up the task. Scrolling images seems even weaker in my opinion, wouldn’t be quicker and less effort demanding, for instance, the pressure of a stupid button? Of course much less cool but I wouldn’t scroll 100 images in its way and I’m sure there could have been a cooler and more usable solution to scroll elements, at the end the I-Pod’s wheel strongest point was probably that (they could have done a virtual wheel also, like some patents they registered showed). Of course they should have done their internal tests, but I still have big concerns about the productivity of those interaction solutions.
Revolutions unfortunately don’t bring always to evolution and if they do it they don’t do it smoothly, creating useless issues that with a proper evolution we wouldn’t face.
I think that your posting seems to imply that the use of animations and effects seem to be implemented to wow people but unfortunatlely detract from the usability. I have to say that I actually believe in these sorts of animations, effects and transitions etc. can often be extremely important to increasing the usability and overall experience of using the product or software.
Partially, the transitions, effects, sounds and animations assist the comprehension of things changing (rollovers, mode changes, context switching). Yes, they look cool but they often actually help. This is something we had to look into when designing a mobile version of the Map of Medicine last year.
The other side is of course the wow and the slick factor. I think this is incredibly important and under-valued from a usability sense as I feel it can make the experience more enjoyable and the interface/product/software more lovable. An example of this is my experience of using a Mac through the OS7 – OS X transition. It all seemed very bubbly and cutesy (verging on saccharine, much like Windows XP) but I loved it, and I continue to love it. It brings a little smile to my face and as a result, I truly believe it increases my confidence in using it and I care much for my Mac than I do for any PC I have worked on.
I believe (based on previous bits of research and my own experience) that improving the visual design of an interface (including sounds and animations) can improve the perception of usability. It makes you appreciate the interface more and get more pleasure out of it. The more pleasure you get, the more your briain can cope with apparent usability issues (like a mask). It’s kind of like the iPod interface. It”s not intuitive (in the truest sense of the word), and it takes a little time to master, but why do you persevere? Because it’s sexy, looks cool and because the core function is to give you access to loads of music on the move – all of this masks some of the dry usability problems in the interface.
Anyway, 2c.
Hi Jason, thanks for your consideration. As you may have noticed by this experimental blog, I’m definitely pro animations, or more precisely transitions, that definitely help the user to understand his journey increasing so the confidence. It’s also proved that sounds and animations can improve the usability. It’s also proved, see Emotional Design, that fancy things that make the experience more engaging improve thus the usability.
But of course one thing is exploring a website or use sporadically a software and another thing is using the Operating System. After many years on Windows those animations looked incredibily annoying to me. Perception of course very different from someone that uses Mac Os X every day from many years. Said that, as the article pointed, in Information Architecture Mac OS X is way forward to Windows. I was talking also about those milliseconds of delay that you can experience for instance when you use a Flash application comparing to a desktop one (even a Director one). Developing high interactive interfaces is something I feel straight away.