3 Factors of Usability: Understanding Ease of Use
What you see is what you get in Dead Space. The sci-fi thriller, released by EA Games in 2008, featured a unique user interface where all the important information for the player was built into the game’s design. The player’s health bar resided on the main character’s back and the ammo count could be seen only when aiming the gun. If the player got lost, a button press revealed markers on the ground showing them the way. Another button press brought up a menu screen beamed out from the player’s suit with a map and inventory list, all without pausing the game. The player could spin the camera around and look at the front of their character and the back of the menu screen.
Dead Space aimed to create a fully immersive world for the player using the user interface to enhance the immersion. Designers even built the user interface into the story, saying the health bar on the suit (a space mining suit) would be viewed and monitored by companions on the mining facility. Story is unveiled through video chats done similar to the inventory menu – also beamed directly from the player’s suit.
Even as video games become more complicated – involving more buttons, moves, and details – there’s an effort toward balancing the information and complexity with efficiency and accessibility. For consumer software, from mobile operating systems to web pages, there are lessons in the user interfaces of video games – using the user interface to enhance the user experience. Enhancing the user experience does not simply mean making the software easier to use.
For designers and developers, there are three factors to consider: creativity, friendliness, and experience. These three factors work together to produce designs for specific audiences by highlighting the needs of the users. Creativity is the artistic expression of the design, mostly governing design elements not specifically intended for functionality. Friendliness is the learning curve for users – how long does it take them to find the information they need, navigate to where they want to go, etc. Experience is the “how does it feel” category – how does the user interface make the user feel: is the learning process fun? Is the design pleasing?
The goal for designers should be to balance these three factors not evenly, but by deciding which to focus on for a given project. The best way to think about these three factors is on a radar graph. Focusing on one factor does not lessen another, but there should be a conscious choice to focus on one based on your desired audience. An e-commerce website will need to focus more on friendliness to make sure customers know how to buy products efficiently. A quirky puzzle video game or artist’s website would focus more on creativity. A game like Dead Space looking to create a wholly immersive experience would focus on experience, creating an interface that enhances the fictional world.
Here are some graphed examples of software using the three factors.
iPhone
Metal Gear Solid 4 video game
ESPN.com
There is a great deal of subjectivity in using the three factors. Design elements may be credited to both creative and experience. The goal is more to help guide designers in thinking about the audience they are designing for and producing a user interface that bests serves the audience’s needs and wants. Even a user interface like the iPhone’s that caters to a broad audience of unexperienced and experienced computer users can fulfill its user’s needs by focusing first on friendliness, but by also creating a rewarding experience with many levels of learning for all users to enjoy.
The key to the three factors is not to sacrifice one for another, but to create balance. Professor Edward Tufte of Yale University, when reviewing the iPhone interface said “To clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information - they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information; instead fix the design.” The goal is not to simplify or dumb-down user interfaces but to smarten them up. Computer programs and video games are capable of doing more and more, leading to difficult editing questions about how to balance more features and more information to new users without alienating veteran users.
Why does this matter? Often, the best answer to software and website design is easier is better. More people can use the website, get information, give you money, etc. But often our needs as designers are more complicated than that. Usability expert Jacob Neilsen touts the most successful web companies have the best usability:
The best sites tend to be the most famous sites because you get to be big on the Internet by having good usability. Google, Yahoo and Amazon are certainly among the top sites in usability: They all emphasize getting users the information they want, as quickly as possible, and then they get out of the way.
Neilsen adds that MySpace is one of the worst designed sites yet remains extremely popular.
The site is horrible, but it works because it's not trying to attract customers or help users accomplish a task such as home banking. The only thing the site does is to allow people to express their personality in a display aimed at their friends. It doesn't matter if other people don't understand what's being said, because the friends are the only target.
If Google, Yahoo, or Amazon had the design aesthetic of MySpace, it’s unlikely any of them would be as popular as they are now. In fact, Facebook follows a similarly minimalist design like Google and is growing faster than MySpace. Let’s compare MySpace and Facebook using the three factors.
On MySpace, you are flooded with advertisements, often low class, embarrassing, or crude, harming the experience (if you’re gay, all you get are gay dating sites). User names can be any format, making it impossible to find people you know, one of the key features of the site. It is easier to search broadly to maybe meet new people, though even this is hampered by large amounts of fake accounts. The vibrant blue, however, is engaging, and the multimedia on the music pages can be very rewarding if you are on the site for that reason. Facebook, on the other hand, focuses on prioritized user needs. The homepage after the login is exclusively your content, with updates on your friends, messages requiring your attention, and links to important features (you can choose which features are important). Text is small, even in the header, which can limit the audience. The small number of ads on Facebook, while often irrelevant (more gay dating), are at least unobtrusive text-based ads.
Facebook focuses on friendliness – using simple terms to guide users to the features they want or need. MySpace did more to push users to advertisements or marketing partnerships – which is why their music section is their best design, but offering questionable value. As a result, Facebook is growing faster while MySpace declines in traffic and membership. The key is not simplicity or even friendliness – it’s the focus on user value. Facebook makes it easier and better to get the features they want while MySpace made it harder. For every website, recognizing the features and value you offer your users and how to highlight these is the key to success.
Video games are an excellent example of the dilemma of balancing simple interfaces with complex features. Recent trends are pushing video games to cater to “casual players” who are not well-versed in the conventions of the medium. Experienced gamers expect certain conventions to be followed in games of each genre. This includes user interface iconography, control schemes, and gameplay mechanics. Gamers know the red bar in the upper left-hand corner is their heath bar; they know the left-analog stick controls movement while the right analog stick controls the camera; and they know boxes break and barrels explode. Casual players, used to Tetris and the first level of Super Mario Bros., struggle with the evolution of complex input devices and on-screen interfaces. Compare the control schemes from Metal Gear in 1987 to Metal Gear Solid 4 in 2008.
The first Nintendo system came with four buttons and a four-button directional pad (d-pad). The PS3 controller came with two analog joysticks, 13 input buttons, and a four-button directional pad. Plus, the PS3 controller had motion control allowing for even more, unseen controls. Even with so many buttons, most buttons serve several functions depending on context, all of which need to be memorized for seamless gameplay. Veteran Metal Gear Solid players, however, have gotten used to this complex control scheme. Many of the controls can be assumed by veteran players, such as aiming, shooting, and movement. They know there will be a reload button and a context-sensitive action button. With this knowledge, veteran gamers can mold their expectations to the idiosyncrasies of this game’s unique controls.
Sometimes 13 buttons can be too limiting leading video game developer Capcom to create a 40 button controller for Steel Battalion, where the gamer controls a giant robot. This $200 controller has been adapted by gamers to control other PC games because, for a certain group, the complexity is part of the challenge and the fun.
In “A Theory of Fun”, Raph Koster, the lead designer of the classic Ultima Online, explains that part of the fun in video games comes from figuring out how to play them. Video games are simply puzzles and gamers are unraveling the rules of the puzzle. When the puzzle is solved, the game is no longer fun. This is why a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe quickly becomes boring while a complex game like Chess can always boggle the mind. This is why even a seemingly simple game like Pac-Man is so challenging and rewarding to a player. The only controls are the four-directions, but gamers both casual and veteran can spend hours trying to get a high score and get to the next level. But the entire game is one, big pattern – each enemy ghost moves in an obtuse pattern that once deciphered can be easily avoided. But to solve the pattern requires hours and hours of repeat play and experimentation. A game like Grand Theft Auto 3, with an open-world allowing for “emergent” gameplay where the player decides how to play offers so many rules and interface options that book-length walkthroughs, upwards of 50,000 words, have been written to teach others how to play the game (Johnson 2005).
How do we apply this to consumer software like websites? It’s best to look at a video game as its own piece of software or operating system. The goal of the user interface in video games is the same as any other piece of consumer software, only video games have their own unique conventions much like an operating system has its unique conventions or a website and browser. For both video games and software, think of these user interfaces like their own mediated realities. Neal Stephenson likened user interfaces to mediate realities – their own worlds for the user to escape into – even something as mechanical as an operating system. Stephenson compares the operating system interface to the fictional worlds created by a movie company like Disney.
Among Hollywood writers, Disney has the reputation of being a real wicked stepmother. It's not hard to see why. Disney is in the business of putting out a product of seamless illusion – a magic mirror that reflects the world back better than it really is. But a writer is literally talking to his or her readers, not just creating an ambience or presenting them with something to look at; and just as the command-line interface opens a much more direct and explicit channel from user to machine than the GUI, so it is with words, writer, and reader. (Stephenson 1999).
Just like the fictional world in a Disney movie, a user interface creates a new world for the user with new rules to learn and follow (and sometimes even try to break). Just like we can separate the worlds of Beauty and the Beast from Aladdin, and the worlds of Mario from Zelda, we can separate the worlds Amazon from Facebook. The user adjusts to context sensitive works – friends has a specific meaning on Facebook, arguably different than friends in the real world. There’s terminology from “Live Feed” to “Boxes” to “Facebook Chat”, all of which become standard vocabulary in the world of Facebook.com. Developing this reality for users through the user interface encourages loyalty from users who adapt themselves to the interface’s specifics. This is also why redesigns are often responded to with hostility from the user base angry that their mediated reality is radically altered.
Designing to Expectations
Just like veteran gamers, veteran computer and internet users expect certain conventions to be followed. While video games can often be more selective with their audiences, choosing to target “hard core” veteran gamers with complex controls, websites are often trying to fulfill a different function than fun, like conveying information or selling goods and services. As such, creating puzzles to keep the website fun is less the goal as making the experience rewarding by making the information, goods, and/or services easy to find and access. Thus, breaking convention on a website is a risky choice.
Website conventions, for instance, can often be elements of navigation and placement of items, usually in the header of the page. Input fields with a go button next to them are search; arrows in navigation denote drop down menus; and sign in/out links should be at the top. With these expectations in mind, website users can learn the unique rules and elements of the website – understanding what each section holds; where new information is; and how to do what they need to do quickly. Just like a video game, websites and software play with conventions to create their own set of rules for users to learn and then utilize.
Balance, even for consumer-facing websites and software, is the best way to engage users. Though friendliness, I believe, should be a priority for most e-commerce websites, several have found success with complex interfaces in certain niche markets. EPSN.com, for instance, packs its homepage with massive amounts of statistics and multimedia, even while following expected conventions. The amount of information requires study to learn the most efficient way to access the specific information the user wants. Stock trading sites offer similarly complex landing pages for user accounts with an assortment of graphs and interactive tools mixed with stock quotes and customizable options. Both website categories, the sports and stock trading site, cater to a die-hard culture even though many of their users might not be as so passionate. One reason could be the same as video games, with users actively studying and learning the website’s unique interface. The learning experience becomes rewarding as the user can find their information faster and more efficient each time they arrive. This accomplishment encourages them to keep returning because they are used to the system in place, locking them in. Getting used to even these unique systems locks people into them, just like the user of Windows trying to switch to a Mac OS or Linux. This kind of complexity likely will work mostly with software and websites with limited competition or functionality vital to the user (ESPN having little competition and trading sites and operating systems offer vital functionality for their respective users).
Encouraging user preference
Filling the needs of many different users can often best be served with customization options to the interface. This can be offering different input options, like allowing gamers to use mouse and keyboards or joysticks, or allowing web users to use computers or mobile devices. Further, the visual interface itself can be customizable, allowing users to change text sizes, color schemes, or where objects are placed. Again, the key is creating a balance between the three factors so the user friendliness does not stamped over creative or experience choices. Smart design can accommodate the users and designer.
For example, Blizzard Entertainment’s popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft features a paired down user interface (at least compared to earlier MMORPG games). Touted as very accessible to casual and inexperienced gamers, World of Warcraft now boasts more than 10 million players from around the world. With so many users, it’s challenging for Blizzard to make World of Warcraft perfect for every user, since casual gamers looking for a simple, easy to learn game are playing along with Metal Gear Solid 4 veteran gamers. Sometimes, complex interfaces are preferred. This is why users can develop their own user interface add-ons to World of Warcraft, turning the default option from this:
into this
World of Warcraft players can add more details about items they find, other players on screen, damage done, or even build a web browser into the game, surfing the web while they play.
For some users, complexity is welcome – they want more information at their finger tips or they simply want a new interface to learn. For others, information can be hidden, ignored, or accessed upon request. This adds a layer to Tufte’s urging to balance information and design – user customization. One of the key features of Apple’s Mac OS and the iPhone is how both make many assumptions about how the user wants information presented and accessed. The iPhone offers little customization with only the ability to move programs around the homepage; there are no options (outside of breaking the DRM on the phone) to build information, like appointments or a search box, into the homepage of the iPhone. On the other extreme, Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, makes next to no assumptions about how users want the operating system to work, providing extensive customization options. And if the developers left anything out, the operating system is open source, allowing anyone to share changes to any part of the program.
Offering options to accommodate a large audience is far too time consuming for most enterprises. World of Warcraft supports a large development community building add-on software, often distributed online for free to other users. Many software applications include APIs or open source their code, which allow anyone with the technical know-how (and sometimes a few hundred dollars for developer’s kits) to create add-ons for the software. Mozilla’s Firefox, an open source web browser, allows anyone to see the entire source code for the software and makes changes to it. Users have created thousands of “skins” which change the visual style of the software. Further, users can add buttons with new functions, like buttons to control their iTunes music, or change the iconography of browser tabs – adding color coding to relay information. Firefox can even help change the user interface of websites using the add-on Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey functions like an add-on program to any website, using user scripts to change the user interface and functionality of most websites. Using Greasemonkey, a user can take away unwanted information from a website, add more information, or change color schemes.
Greasemonkey, in addition to other user modifications, can be scary to designers fearful of changes users might make to their software. Already, the Firefox add-on AdBlock Plus raised controversy as it blocks most advertisements. A few websites announced they would block traffic from the Firefox browser because of this add-on. What these websites ignored was that their user experience was becoming negative. Too many advertisements were annoying the user enough to download software, either because they cluttered the user interface making it harder or less enjoyable to user, or because the advertisement rendering slowed the browser and internet. By improving the balance of the user interface, maybe by increasing focus on experience, web users would not need an add-on like AdBlock Plus.
Allowing and even encouraging these user modifications significantly increase a single design’s potential user base and value to that user base. This saves the designer’s time, money, and resources because they can focus on making the base software the best possible instance of the design. Letting users develop their own user interface options further can guide designers to new functionality ideas. Users basically help decide how to allocate resources to best fulfill their own needs, making the software more rewarding. Thus, it is advantageous to offer some customizable options to a design, like text-size changes and moving around items (like Facebook boxes), but to avoid overloading casual web users, you can foster a user community with an API or add-ons to accommodate the needs of power users.
Simple is good, but not always best. Balancing creativity, friendliness, and experience to best serve your users will be the key to building the best design and the best business. Artists who want to highlight their style will focus on creativity and experience – the best ways to show off their work. Content and service websites can find benefits in friendliness and experience. As software and web technology becomes more complex and feature-rich, users will demand more and more. The goal for designers to figure out how to offer more with less. What does that less mean? Less frills, fringe, or flavor leaving nothing but a bare-bones design? Or can we mix some creativity to make a friendly experience packed with information and valuable resources for customers and users. Value for the user is what matters.
