In my UI manifesto I mentioned a rule of good design: “distinguish navigation from content.” That means that for all information your application gives, it should be immediately and unmistakably apparent whether the information is situational data (i.e. content such as a particular webpage) or a application functionality (i.e. navigation, like the address bar). This should be apparent from the very first use without having to try it out.

Metaphorically speaking, if you run Safeway, don’t make an employee uniform that is simply a red shirt; if you do that then anybody who walks in with a red shirt could be mistaken as an employee. Make the distinguishing feature something that cannot be mimicked.

 

 

A real life example from just this week. Youtube failed to do this. Notice this particular ad shows as “x” button in the uppper-right that indicates the ad can be closed. How do I, as a user, know that this is a real X button made by youtube, and not a drawn x in the ad image itself that will trick me into clicking the ad? I don’t, because the the X acts identical to the rest of the ad, the hover icon is the same, no css changes, the two possibilities are indistinguishable until I actually try it out.

How could you fix this? Make the X button partially leave the ad box in the upper right (an area that I can infer the ad doesn’t have permission to draw to) and have it highlight its border yellow when it is hovered (this assumes that the youtube ads are not mouse-responsive, which is true at the time of writing).

What’s the big deal?

So, what is the big deal? Afterall, clicking the X in the youtube ad does end up closing it, seems pretty minor.

It’s a big deal because it’s a systemic problem following a very basic formula that is easy to fix. The general principle behind “distinguish navigation from content” is that the user always needs to be aware of who they are communicating with. 

An old virus trick, back when viruses spread across file-sharing networks, was the someMusic.exe trick, where a trojan would be crafted that would have the default icon of windows media player. Hence, if a user had file-extensions turned off on a PC computer (the default), the file would appear exactly like a music file and would be double-clicked readily. This is again an example of a blurring between communication; the operating system isn’t communicating unambiguously if the icon you are seeing is a certification of file type or is content picked by the application’s creator.

Every single application I use fails UI/UX in simple, fixable ways.

Part 1: An Analogy 

You travel 200 years into the future. And walk into a bank. Fortunately everything is in english. You recall having some savings that should have accumulated some interest by now, so you wan to withdraw. The first thing you do is look around the bank nothing is familiar ¹. So you look for somebody to ask for help, though there are people, you don’t know who is an employee and who is not an employee since there are no consistent uniforms and there is no “counter” that would designate employee-only zone ². You walk up to a girl in grey and ask “Hi can you help me, I’m quite new here and am totally lost!”

The attractive young girl looks back and says, “Open all bookmarked accounts or Open all bookmarked accounts in table view?” You look at her blankly and she returns the blank stare before repeating herself exactly.

You realize she is an android. “Help?” You ask her “Can I speak to your supervisor?” Nothing. You realize she is unable to communicate with you and also unable to help you find anybody who can ³. You decide you need to leave the bank and get help from outside. As you start to walk out the door, a guard blocks your path and asks, “Are you sure you want to terminate transaction initiation?” You have no idea what this is but you’re uncomfortable and say yes and hustle away.

Perhaps you come away blaming yourself for not understanding. Even though you know that with time you could become an expert in such a place, you leave frustrated and preferring not to return.

Part 2: The Alternative

You walk into a futuristic bank. Their advanced technology recognizes you have never been here before, but doesn’t aggressively nag you about it. You see several clearly distinct counters, each with one person in a special red outfit, you infer those are the employees. You walk up to the nearest station and say “Hi, I’m new here I need to check if I have an account.” Though full language comprehension technology isn’t around, the android recognizes you are a new person and that what you said was very far from an appropriate action. “I didn’t understand that. I am an automated account-opener robot. I recognize the commands ‘open account’, ‘close account’, and ‘help’. You can also always find help at our help desk.” She gestures.

You see that one of the stations had a HUGE sign labeled HELP hanging over it, and every desk has a sign over it⁴. You feel a bit silly for not noticing it sooner. You go to the help desk and soon are getting futuristic video tutorials.

Part 3: The Lessons

1. Follow a convention for design (preferably a common one).

   This is actually a point I have seen championed before in UI, yet it just doesn’t seem to be followed. It’s like going into a house and not realizing there was a door somewhere because the nob was so elaborate (or out-of-place) it was unrecognizable.

   

   I’m going to pick on chrome because it’s one of my favorite applications. Look at the debug toolbar. Could you realistically expect somebody to know how to disable cache with that? Do you even remember how (perhaps you didn’t know it’s possible). Turns out the gear in the lower right (I don’t know why it’s separated from the other buttons) is effectively a menu (despite no visual indication of this).

2. Distinguish navigation from content. 

   It should always be apparent to the user when something is System-wide navigation, App-wide-navigation, or custom-content. This is usually done quite well and isn’t often a problem. But look at the picture below:

   Don’t you agree that uninstall button is weirdly placed? Look at it for a while, and you may realize that it’s simply a bookmark to a page entitled “Uninstall Chrome,” but there’s no systematic way to know this.

   

3. All errors should give you unambiguous directions to their solution.Directing to a intuitive help interface is sufficient, the point is that somebody who’s never used your system should at the very least be able to systematically find their way to the information on how to use your system.

   

   Case Study: Dos Prompt. I remember as a lad of 9 being at the magical black terminal that responded to secret passwords (“called commands”) consisting of unguessable combinations of characters. It was reminiscent of a haunted mansion in scooby doo where the only way to get to a room would be by playing the secret piano keys. I would type almost anything except the commands I knew (qbasic, dir, cd) and would get back an ominous “Unknown command or filename.” Until one day, in an act of annoyance I typed help (I meant it as more of an imperative at the machine than anything). All of the bad command or filename messages should have mentioned this command! There was an amazing help tutorial back then in dos (not like now) that taught piping and everything with enough examples for me to learn at that age with limited vocabulary.

   I want to take a second here and hammer this point. Qbasic was one of those “magic passwords” that I learned only through my brother’s friend, my whole foray into coding was almost stymied by terrible UI.

4. Enumerate all available action. 

   This may be the biggest failing of modern UI. Going back to the chrome example above, would you believe I didn’t know about that lower right gear for months of using chrome’s debug menu (and I certainly wasn’t the only one)? With almost any application, I routinely discover that there are hidden features available that I wish I had known existed sooner. Did you know you can drag a window to the left edge of your screen in Windows 7? Did you know you can drag tabs not only in one browser window but between browser windows/instances in chrome? Did you know that you move a window with the keyboard by pressing alt-space  (then down, then enter, then the arrow keys?)?  Did you know you can see memory usage of tabs in chrome by pressing shift-escape? And don’t get me started on gmail, office, or mac. This point is so in-depth and I have so much to say on it that it will take an entire post of its own to cover. Stay tuned for more.