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.