Alan CooperRobert ReimannDavid Cronin et al.John Wiley - About Face. The Essentials of Interaction Design

This book has a simple premise: If we design and develop digital products in such a way that the people who use them can easily achieve their goals, they will be satisfied, effective, and happy. They will gladly pay for our productsand recommend that others do the same. Assuming that we can do so in a cost-effective manner, this will translate into business success.

On the surface, this premise seems obvious: Make people happy, and your products will be a success. Why, then, are so many digital products so difficult and unpleasant to use? Why arent we all happy and successful when we use them? Why, despite the steady march of faster, cheaper, and more accessible technology, are we still so often frustrated?

The answer, in short, is the absence of design as a fundamental and equal part of the product planning and development process.

Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. We propose a somewhat more detailed definition of human-oriented design activities:

• Understanding the desires, needs, motivations, and contexts of people using products
• Understanding business, technical, and domain opportunities, requirements, and constraints
• Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products whose form, content, and behavior are useful, usable, and desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible

This definition is useful for many design disciplines, although the precise focus on form, content, and behavior varies depending on what is being designed. For example, an informational website may require particular attention to content, whereas the design of a simple TV remote control may be concerned primarily with form. As discussed in the Introduction, interactive digital products are uniquely imbued with complex behavior.

When performed using the appropriate methods, design can, and does, provide the missing human connection in technological products. But most current approaches to the design of digital products dont work as advertised.

In the nearly 20 years since the publication of the first edition of About Face, software and interactive digital products have greatly improved. Many companies have begun to focus on serving peoples needs with their products and are spending the time and money needed to support the design process. However, many more still fail to do soat their peril. As long as businesses continue to focus solely on technology and market data while shortchanging design, they will continue to create the kind of products weve all grown to despise.

The following sections describe a few of the consequences of creating products that lack appropriate design and thus ignore users needs and desires. How many of your digital products exhibit some of these characteristics?

Digital products often blame users for making mistakes that are not their fault, or should not be. Error messages like the one shown in pop up like weeds, announcing that the user has failed yet again. These messages also demand that the user acknowledge his failure by confirming it: OK.

Digital products and software frequently interrogate users, peppering them with a string of terse questions that they are neither inclined nor prepared to answer: Where did you hide that file? Patronizing questions like Are you sure? and Did you really want to delete that file, or did you have some other reason for pressing the Delete key? are equally irritating and demeaning.

Thanks for sharing. Why didnt the application notify the library? Why did it want to notify the library? Why is it telling us? And what are we OKing, anyway? It is not OK that the application failed!

Our software-enabled products also fail to act with a basic level of decency. They forget information we tell them and dont do a very good job of anticipating our needs. Even the iPhonegenerally the baseline for good user experience on a digital devicedoesnt anticipate that someone might not want to be pestered with a random phone call when he is in the middle of a business meeting that is sitting right there in the iPhones own calendar. Why cant it quietly put a call that isnt from a family member into voicemail?

Digital products regularly assume that people are technology literate. For example, in Microsoft Word, if a user wants to rename a document she is editing, she must know that she must either close the document or use the Save As menu command (and remember to delete the file with the old name). These behaviors are inconsistent with how a normal person thinks about renaming something; rather, they require that a person change her thinking to be more like the way a computer works.

Digital products are also often obscure, hiding meaning, intentions, and actions from users. Applications often express themselves in incomprehensible jargon that cannot be fathomed by normal users (What is your SSID?) and are sometimes incomprehensible even to experts (Please specify IRQ.).

If a 10-year-old boy behaved like some software apps or devices, hed be sent to his room without supper. These products forget to shut the refrigerator door, leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, and cant remember what you told them only five minutes earlier. For example, if you save a Microsoft Word document, print it, and then try to close it, the application again asks you if you want to save it! Evidently the act of printing caused the application to think the document had changed, even though it did not. Sorry, Mom, I didnt hear you.

Software often requires us to step out of the main flow of tasks to perform functions that shouldnt require separate interfaces and extra navigation to access. Dangerous commands, however, are often presented right up front where users can accidentally trigger them. Dropbox, for example, sandwiches Delete between Download and Rename on its context menus, practically inviting people to lose the work theyve uploaded to the cloud for safekeeping.

Furthermore, the appearance of softwareespecially business and technical applicationscan be complex and confusing, making navigation and comprehension unnecessarily difficult.

Computers and their silicon-enabled brethren are purported to be labor-saving devices. But every time we go out into the field to watch real people doing their jobs with the assistance of technology, we are struck by how much work they are forced to do simply to manage the proper operation of software. This work can be anything from manually copying (or, worse, retyping) values from one window into another, to attempting (often futilely) to paste data between applications that otherwise dont speak to each other, to the ubiquitous clicking and pushing and pulling of windows and widgets around the screen to access hidden functionality that people use every day to do their job.

The evidence is everywhere that digital products have a lot of explaining to do when it comes to their poor behavior.

Most digital products emerge from the development process like a sci-fi monster emerging from a bubbling tank. Instead of planning and executing with a focus on satisfying the needs of the people who use their products, companies end up creating solutions thatwhile technically advancedare difficult to use and control. Like mad scientists, they fail because they have not imbued their creations with sufficient humanity.