Sunday, November 28, 2004

Plain and Simple

As most of the internet community has noticed, since the advent of brilliantly simple interfaces such as Google and others, more and more sites (mostly businesses) have gone down the road of keeping the initial interface very streamlined.

This is an excellent example of where HCI has impacted upon the designers of such interfaces. With previous interfaces the aim used to be to present as much information as possible in a structured manner, but most designers have now realised that using HTML tools they can hide and show different parts of the interface very easily. Furthermore they can, using cookies and other techniques, personalise the site for further visits. This means that as each user has his own preferences and interests that he wishes to persue, then he can focus in on these interests.

One side effect of the simplicity of the interface design, is the powerful use of menus. Most sites tend to employ a wide based structure for menus which cover a large part of the site with a few clicks. These menus often allow the site to narrow down to the interests of the user very easily. From the basic home page the user can then go to the page (s)he wants at the click of a few buttons.

From the basic HTML that used to be around a few years ago, the internet has come a long way. Even flash seems to be used very little in menus and pages as javascript has made it much simpler to hide and show various parts of the interface at the click of a few buttons.

The interface I will discuss now is that of GMail.com, Google's recent venture into the internet based email market. It has a very simple design to it coded almost entirely in JavaScript. It has a menu on the left hand side which details the categories of emails such as Inbox, Sent Mail, Spam etc. Below this it has a menu which has the ability of being hidden. This contains the labels that a user may give to his emails. I will not go into the way labelling works but this can be Googled by searching for a review on GMail.

The neatness of GMail's interface is in the way they present all information as text, in a confined area and still get a very good level of communication between the user and his email. They do not over burden the user with ads or pictures that may be distracting (i mean isn't the whole point of banner ads to lure the user away from his email into buying something), but instead they present the user's email to them in a simple manner.

The side menu takes very little room as it is mere text and so creates a lot of space for the main parts of the interface. This enables features such as email snippets and other info to be all shown on just one line. This tends to make the interface consistent with conditions such as different resolutions and window sizes. Moreover, if you've tried to make the window smaller, the way they have designed it the snippet just gets smaller without forcing the any change in the interface. In other words unlike other interfaces it is very rigid in presenting information in exactly the same way time after time. This is very important as the user needs to have a mental picture of how the interface works so that it becomes something (s)he does not need to think about when using it.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Google Keywords



The trick to getting the page you want in a search engine is all about the type of words or phrases you use. You use the wrong words and u'll get the wrong results. Therefore, often what happens is that I do a simple search of what I want, which I know will return hundreds of thousands of results, and then I look through the first couple to see if they meet my match. When they don't I refine the search either by using more specific terms or I hone in on the required result by including more search terms.

The idea of a good piece of software is that it should assist the user in all ways that it can to make life easier and make the usage of the software more efficient. I add a word of caution here that efficient doesn't in fact mean good software, just efficient software. But anyhow, if the software is efficient and on top of that has good usability like google does, then it should make an attempt to push the user in the right direction to maximise its possibilities.

Now, my proposition is that from a HCI perspective, Google does do most things a user would want, but what it doesn't do is help to get the perfect phrases that a pinpointed search would achieve. Therefore, I think they should have a Keyword system which perhaps computes, using facts from previous similar searches and their pagerank system, the possibilities that the user can input to get a better search. A much better version than kelkoo currently has, I must add, because kelkoo's version is very poor and hardly returns better results than the current search u may have done.

The fact that Google in the background can perform lots of queries with different phrasing based on the search of the individual would help enormously as they could show some sort of benchmark against the current search. In this way there would be a greater level of interactivity between the user and his searches, thus resulting in a better solution.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Opening Train Doors

What is the best place to put the open button for a mechanical door? A simple question you may say but in fact it can have a huge impact on the response time of someone opening the door.

Going home from uni the other day I was on one of them older style Central Trains where I noticed the difficulty a few of the passengers had when approaching the internal doors of the train which separates the seating area from area around the doors.

A girl walked up to the door expecting it to open, but on realising it was not automatic she started looking for the button to open it. Naturally she looked at her eye level, which must have been about 5' 7", for a button but she did not find any on the door itself. A boy who was seated on the luggage area seeing the button, which was actually closer to him than to her, pressed it for her.

This raises a couple of points for designing an interface, firstly that the system should do those things automatically without need for user intervention which the user expect the system to do. Furthermore, buttons, menus, etc should be at the user's eye level, or more importantly somewhere where he/she expects it to be.

They happen to have solved the problem on the latest model of the trains by putting the button on the actual door, but better still making the door automatic so that as you walk towards it opens at the appropriate speed. One problem I've noticed however, is that if you stand directly beneath it, the detector doesn't notice and starts to close the door.

Also they use much brighter colours and bigger signs on the new trains making it easier to see the button and realise at a glance what to do.

That is probably the purpose of HCI, that at a glance the user is able to understand what to do and how to do it. This may be a reason why computer games seem to exhibit good HCI behaviour, especially when talking about FPS or Adventure games where the person becomes the character in the game