I'm not a usability expert, but I've been fortunate enough at Oracle to work
closely with very talented usability engineers on the areas of JDeveloper I'm
responsible for.
From time to time, we invite customers to come to Oracle and participate in
usability tests so that we can get quantitative data about whether functionality
is easy to use. As a developer, sitting in on these tests (developers are kept
safely hidden away from customers on the other side of a one-way mirror) has
been hugely beneficial in the past. I've often been surprised to find that a
feature or dialog I thought would be pretty straightforward stumps three out
of five test participants.
Often, the solution to such usability problems become readily apparent when
you're sitting watching a customer try to figure out how to use the tool. Many
times during these tests, I've had those real "light bulb" moments,
discovering the way I should have designed something in the first place.
It's almost impossible as a developer, or even as a user interface designer
to avoid letting your familiarity with the tool or the user interface patterns
in your product cloud your impression of how new users will learn to use your
software. At least, in the case of JDeveloper, we can make some basic assumptions
about the technical experience and tolerance of our users. Developers tend be
willing to experiment a little until they figure something out, and are usually
not as susceptible to the fear that novice computer users experience: the terror
that every mouse click could bring it all crashing down. It must be incredibly
difficult for the developers at Microsoft to design a product such as Windows
that has to cater to the complete novice user all the way up to the super-power
users that developers are (or at least like to think we are).
The last week or so, I've been visiting my parents in Edinburgh and providing
a bit of basic Windows tuition. My mum is completely unsavvy when it comes to
computers. She's only just getting over that initial fear of bringing it all
down with a single click (she still has a bit to go, if the audible horror whenever
an accidental click brings a new window to the top is anything to go by). They're
planning to scoot over to France or Spain for a few months later in the year,
and now have a laptop, loaded up with Autoroute and Windows XP.
It was initially quite an erm... dictatorial... experience, with me saying
things like, "if you want to see the roads near dijon, you can drag a box
like this, then click inside it like that to zoom in", with my mum diligently
trying to keep up on the mouse. This wasn't proving to be a very successful
method of tuition... I'm pretty sure I won't be working for Oracle Education
any time soon...
Near the end of the day, my mum asked how to switch the computer off (it's
an old, second hand laptop with no funky power features). I'd already covered
this about five times already, with my mum initially expressing the familiar
surprise that a button called "Start" leads to a menu that turns the
computer off. So I decided to try a different tact. "Why don't you see
if you can figure it out?"
A Windows Explorer window was on screen at the time. Fairly quickly, she spotted
the Help menu, which seemed like a good candidate. The help menu has three items
in it:
Rather than going for "Help and Support Center" (the correct option),
she went straight to "About Windows", and was then confused by a dialog
box that displays copyright information and tells you how much physical memory
Windows has.
I've recently been reading About
Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper. At this point, I recalled that this book actually
specifically cites Help->About as being a problematic menu item to have in
the Help menu, because it typically doesn't actually provide any helpful information
about the product. I was skeptical about how much of an issue this actually
was until I saw it in action. Thinking about it, it's quite a natural choice.
She wanted to find out about shutting down windows.
About Windows sounds like it would be more useful for doing this than the Help
and Support Center, which frankly sounds like something you have to pay for.
Having redirected her to the correct place, she was confronted with this:
She immediately expressed some horror at the sheer amount of text
on this window. Actually, having never really used Windows XP's help before,
so was I. I asked her if there was anything obvious she could use to help her
find out how to carry out her task and she said, "I have to read through
all this text first". We both found it distracting that after a second
or so, a few paragraphs more text appeared under the "Did you know?"
section.
The engineers who designed this knew that most users would end
up needing to use the Search control to find the specific thing they were looking
for. They made its label really big, put it at the top of the
dialog, and made the background behind it a different color. I think it really
stands out. But the amount of text in the area below still seems to distract
users. Or my mum at least, admittedly she doesn't constitute a decent test sample
:)
Eventually, she spotted the Windows basics bullet,
and clicked on it. Shutting down the computer is pretty basic.
My first impression on seeing this was that my mum would never
figure out that "Core Windows tasks" was probably the place to go.
The words "core" and "task" seem pretty technical for a
section of the help dedicated to completely new users. She'd also probably miss
the subtle cross in the icon indicating that this is in fact a folder containing
subtopics. Indeed this was the case, and she kind of stared blankly at this
screen for a few seconds before I suggested clicking on the "Core Windows
tasks" item.
Once again, this provoked a blank stare. I later found out that
had she clicked on "Logging on and off Windows", the fun would be
over, and we could go out for dinner. Having scarcely used Windows herself alone,
never mind in a multi user environment, logging on and off sounded to her like
something vaguely related to trees.
At this point, I finally relented and suggested using the Search
control at the top of the window. Painstakingly, she typed out "closing
down" in the search box, and very quickly figured out that the big green
button with an arrow on it was the thing to press.
I'm a new convert of these big green "Go" buttons in
XP. Now I see why Microsoft chose to use them instead of plain old text buttons.
It's obvious that you need to click on them to Go. You don't have to read the
text to make sure it's doing to do what you expect it to do.
I fully expected it to all go horribly wrong because she'd typed
"closing down" instead of "shutting down", but now something
really impressive happened:
The search capabilities in Windows help system actually seem
to be very good. This was spot on, and better still, it was refined. We didn't
get all 300 topics in the whole of the help system containing the words "closing"
and "down". We got exactly what we were looking for.
However...
This initially looks great. There are specific instructions about
how to shut down the computer. The problem is, the instructions are wrong. It
looks like someone forgot to update them when they changed the look and feel
of Windows between 2000 and XP. If you display the Start menu in Windows XP,
there is no Shut Down. It has been replaced with Turn
Off Computer (much better, shame the help wasn't updated). Clicking
it also doesn't display a drop-down list.
I hope this article doesn't read like a jibe at Windows or Microsoft.
Here's the thing about this process... at almost every stage, I felt that Windows
had been designed in the way I'd probably design it to be intuitive for new
users. In many ways, it works far better than anything I would have designed.
It's also a bit of an unlikely situation. My mum would eventually have found
the Turn Off Computer item by accident in the Start
menu. Perhaps if the help topic had been correct at the end, I would have been
a bit more impressed. After all, we got there in the end.
There isn't really a moral to this story. I just found it interesting
to watch, and felt it was worth sharing. It reinforced my belief that watching
users figuring out how to use a product is incredibly valuable, and reminded
me that software companies (Oracle included) should always carefully check help
topics and make sure they're up to date.
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