Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

Tonight, I drove out past Dulles airport, because we had some time to kill before meeting my girlfriend's friend who was flying in.

Something about the whole area out there didn't feel right. Strip malls and developments abounded, of course. Just plopped down randomly in places just because. Giant overpasses and confusing messes of roads. And Dulles Town Center, this giant fancy mall, was the same.

Part of it might have been the hour. It was late, and not very many people were around. But part of it was design. The mall was designed not for people, but for crowds. So without the crowds, it felt empty. Pieces of it were designed to remind you of things like old train stations, or temples, or something I guess, but none of it was designed to live in. It was just built as a temple to consumerism, or a castle, surrounded by a moat of steaming asphalt.

It, like the rest of everything else out there, wasn't designed for people. It was designed for cars. Everything is scaled to cars, not humans. I think that's part of it.

And part of it might be it all feels like a rotting mask, because it's not sustainable. I don't mean it in some kind of new-agey sense, I mean it in the literal sense of this can't go on. And what can't go on, won't. But it'll hang on a lot longer than you think it will.

Maybe the desperation was what I felt. THe retail stores, desperately waving their hole card of Christmas, trying to spur people into spending still more money they don't have. All the overpriced stuff we don't need, that marketers spend their days trying to convince us we can't do without. The baby trees and the old fashioned wooden benches scattered amidst parking lots, desperately trying to pretend to be a park...

Or maybe it's none of those. Maybe it's just me being tired, and being elitist or something. Or maybe the overwhelming attempts to make things seem fancy kicked in my latent anarchist feelings.

I don't know. This is why I probably shouldn't blog at 2 in the morning.

A lot of everyday frustrations with technology (among many other things) come from a simple root. The interface of the technology wasn't designed for the ease of use for the user, it was designed for the ease of building or or saving money or reusing an old design or to look "cool" or whatever the needs of the designer are. The best interfaces are those that are simple enough to become invisible with little practice. Yes, people can get used to almost any interface with sufficient practice, and then they're going to not want to change and start over again. Witness the survival of the QWERTY keyboard. Which is all the more reason to get things right the first time.

So what's a good interface have?

It should be as simple as possible. That's important. People only can remember so much stuff at once. By simple, I mean the number of options at any one time is limited, and each is distinct. And what they do should be fairly obvious.

Feedback. When the user does something, the interface should respond, and the response should be clearly tied to what the user did. That way people build associations to them quicker. And if they do something wrong, it should say so too, also clearly. And help lead them to what they want to do.

Those are the two biggest ones I can think of. I'm sure there's others, but I'm not an interface engineer. I'm just a guy who has to use crappy websites to put in reports. The main thing is this. The interface needs to be designed for other people, not for the people designing it. The best interfaces become invisible, the more the user has to notice it and think about how to work it, rather than thinking about what they're trying to do, the worse the interface is.