Consistency is the hobgoblin or small minds... or is it?

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In my career, I have heard the quote “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” when a client or business owner wanted to do something new, often for the sake of doing something new. The full quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson is ““A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” There is a very important distinction there.

Consistency is essential to reducing the cognitive load of your interface – the mental effort required to complete a task. When a design is consistent, every interaction feels smooth and frictionless. When it is too inconsistent, the user must expend unnecessary effort figuring out the interface instead of completing the work.

Design patterns, like cliches, are used over and over again because they speak to an underlying truth. UI patterns are design solutions to common usability problems. Patterns benefit everyone – users already recognize how to use them from previous exposure, and designers don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Knowing where to find a home button, or how links are styled, or how to interact with a list builder are important to a user because few people sit down with an express goal of “I want to use this interface.” Instead, they want to complete a task, and your interface is either the tool that allows them to accomplish their goal or the roadblock keeping them from getting things done.

On the other hand, inconsistency is not all bad. You need to know when and why to break the consistency without leading to design chaos. There are several reasons you may wish to be inconsistent within your established style or conventions and patterns in the market.

All established patterns were once new. Without stretching our designs, we cannot progress. Doing the same things over and over will yield boring, uniform designs. Sometimes experimentation is necessary to see if social assumptions still hold true. When I first started developing CBT courses, the first module was always “How to Use a Mouse.” Times have changed and many advanced interaction patterns are now considered commonplace.

Sometimes the goal is to slow the user down. A friend of mine, Dr. Steve Fedorko, once floated the controversial idea that sometimes an organization should deter or prevent learning in order to force the user to slow down and contemplate their decisions. Actions with extreme consequences may be designed to change from use to use, so a user cannot mindlessly blast through without considering the consequences.

Intentional inconsistency can draw attention to your site for novelty, but must match the context – having a parallax slider and infinite zoom interface may be flashy, but would not work well for most purposes in a tax preparation organization. For that organization, reducing cognitive burden, streamlining performance and minimizing risk of error has to outweigh a “really bichin’ interface.”

The key, as is most often the case in design, is balance. Consistency does not equal uniformity. Design shouldn’t be a game of templates, but should reflect the usability advantages of existing patterns.

Where Does UX Belong?

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If you ask ten people where user experience belongs in an organization, you will likely get eleven answers, but first, you might get asked what you mean by user experience (UX).

  • Client (or Customer) Experience (CX), refers to the impression you leave with your client, resulting in how they think of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. This involves every step from advertising, brochures and public websites to forms, call centers and correspondence.

  • User Experience, the way I am defining it, is focussed on the time the client is interacting with the website or web application to accomplish a task.

I work in Information Technology (IT), and our team is integrally involved in the requirements and design of systems.  We focus on information architecture, interaction design, visual design, accessibility and usability testing.  When our organization needs user research, personas, client journeys, concept testing, content strategy, brand guidelines, etc. we have marketing partners who collaborate with us.  It's not a clean division, and we run into issues doing pure research that can't be charged back to a specific IT project.  On the other hand, the collaboration we have with Marketing rarely gets to the level of detail needed to integrate legacy back-end systems and databases.  The concept testing gives high level direction, but does not reflect the complexity of our existing systems.

I wish we had more time and resources for user research.  Given the right budget support, that would be easier to accomplish on a team within Marketing. 

I am also proud of the team's ability to partner with development and quality assurance to make systems that benefit our users on tight timeframes, that would be more difficult if we weren't part of the IT organization.

I don't have a good answer for where UX belongs in an organization.  This is a question that will probably not have an answer, or many answers depending on your specific circumstances.

In Defense of Clippy

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Clippy the Microsoft Agent

Clippy was ahead of his time.

I'll let that sink in.

Clippy, the infamous Microsoft Office assistant,  was introduced in November 1996. He was refined three years later, in Microsoft Office 2000. He went into retirement two years later, when he was turned off by default. And he finally departed this digital veil in 2007, when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together.

While he was eventually consigned to the dustbin of failed software, like Microsoft Bob, at the time, his novelty spun off a wave of "conversational agents." I worked on "Seemore the Sock Puppet" - a conversational agent for Payless ShoeSouce back in the 90s who you would click to "See more" - get it?  He waggled his eyebrows, and danced around the screen.  In a juvenile Easter Egg, there was one pixel on the screen that would make him pass gas, if you knew where to find it.

Clippy is famous for being one of the worst user interfaces ever deployed to the mass public. He stopped users to ask them if they needed help with basic tasks, like writing a letter or making a spreadsheet. In user experience terms, Clippy was “optimized for first use”: amusing the first time you encountered him, and frustrating after that. He was a puppet who only knew one script and kept repeating it, at you, throughout the workday.

Today, we have Conversational Agents again!  Apple's Siri, Amazon's Echo and Google Home, not to mention all manner of chatbots on the web are all examples of the evolution of the conversational agent. A conversational agent is a software program which interprets and responds to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. It integrates computational linguistics techniques with communication over the internet.

Why are these agents so much more successful than clippy? - I have a few hypotheses:

  1. They are user-invoked. Instead of interrupting your work or conversation with proactive suggestions, these agents do not speak until spoken to. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if Siri were to interject "You seem to be having an argument with your spouse - would you like me to read emails relevant to the situation?"

  2. They demonstrate semantic learning and artificial intelligence. Technology has developed to the point that these agents are much more flexible and "conversational." Google Home can keep track of context and respond correctly to unclear pronouns.  For example, while playing music, you can ask, "Hey Google, who is this?" and Google will accurately interpret you are asking about the artist for the music currently playing.  In addition, you can ask Google about a nearby sushi restaurant, and then ask "How far away is that?" and Google will understand you are referring to the restaurant you were just asking about.

  3. They are often voice-controlled.  With the exception of chatbots, these conversational agents are triggered with voice cues, respond audibly and can be used hands-free.  The ease of being able to wonder out loud who played the Joker in the 60's Batman series (Cesar Romero), and have Google tell you without pulling out a phone or laptop or reading and parsing text is a game-changer.

  4. They have personalities, but not overwhelming personalities. Each of the conversational agents have fans and Easter Eggs of questions you can ask to get funny answers programmed by developers.  They tell jokes, play games and sing songs, but only when explicitly requested.  Otherwise, they are all business. 
    Personalities have been added to chatbots as well. Students at The Centre for Psychology at Athabasca University developed the Freudbot, with whom a student can engage in an online conversation with a simulated Sigmund Freud.  Freudbot is capable of discussing a range of personal and psychological topics.

Conversational agents only work when they are truly conversational.  They require the semantic awareness and ability to follow a conversation that has only been recently possible in technology.  Poor Clippy was just a victim of timing (and poor animation).

 

Best Practices

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The thing about best practices is they never stay the same.

Long ago, best practices told us fixed-width websites using table-based design were the way to ensure a consistent experience for users (of course, all users were surfing using desktop computers, and you had to choose 800×600 resolution to get all of them). Best practice also led us to the era of “looks best in Internet Explorer” or Netscape Navigator. Back then, I thought I was keeping up with the trends to help anyone who came to my site see things the way I intended.

My problem, and the problem shared by the people who created and popularized the best practices — was I’d chosen a my own familiar, comfortable context for the sites I’d build. I was building websites for my context: the browsing conditions that I was used to. I was doing my work on a fast computer with a modern browser, large high-resolution monitor and a high-speed internet connection—that’s what the web was, to me.

We have to change our context, from providing the web the way we intend, to allowing visitors to consume our web the way they desire.  That could mean on a mobile device, using a variety of browsers, or on a 3G connection. Our web resources have to be flexible enough to adjust to the context of the visitor, instead of allowing ourselves to set the ground rules. That means keeping up with the latest best practices, and being willing to challenge or even reject “best practices” that don’t serve our visitors.

Dashboards: Ideas with Action

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To quote a Japanese proverb, vision without action is a daydream.

I was working on dashboards within a logfile collection last week, when I was challenged how to determine the right components for the dashboard, and had several insights.

  • There is not one "dashboard" - there are dashboards for each stakeholder. The data of interest to each stakeholder depends on his or her entry perspective.

  • Dashboards are meant to provide a synopsis, not the whole story.  A user needs to be able to identify issues at a glance, with as little involvement as possible.  Pie charts, bar charts, and averages all provide a high level indicator that can be drilled down if something looks amiss.

  • The level of information isn't the same across stakeholders. Trends over time may be significant to an executive, but an engineer may need specific details at the transaction level. A system wide response time number is relevant to a user who knows tolerances and expected values, but a global number may mask small components within the average. Drill-downs, trends and thresholds are all contextual to the user viewing the dashboard.

  • It isn't enough for the data represented to be interesting. Seeing where in the world our users are connecting from may be interesting, but have no impact on me or my plans. I have to be able to act on the information, or I am just presenting trivia.

This leads me to my overarching recommendation on dashboards:

"Identify the highest level of visualization for each stakeholder that provides meaningful information, leading to action."

 

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