If only I had a pistol . . why are you letting your users do things they're not allowed to do?

I heard about a man in Colorado who shot his laptop because it kept crashing on him. This story, which is a couple of years old now, illustrates just how annoying computers can be.

My view is that computers should avoid being frustrating wherever possible. Or, rather, that designers and programmers should do everything they can to make their devices and software work for the user.

I've just had a very frustrating experience. It's frustrated me on a number of levels:

1. It's told me I've done something wrong, even though it could have stopped me from doing it.
2. It doesn't give me any assistance to solve the problem.
3. The only way I can tell if I've solved the problem is to keep on submitting the data, and be told over and over that I've done the same thing wrong.

This is the technological equivalent of someone pointing their finger at you and laughing. It's unforgivable. And what makes it worse is that it's the fault of one of my all time favourite organisations, and web sites, the BBC.

Here's what happened to me, after I'd written a well-balanced, witty, and dignified comment to a story on the 'drought' currently being suffered by the UK.

So why did you let me type 501 characters? Why not stop me at 500? Or, if you don't want to do that, why not tell me how many characters I've typed so far? Or if you don't want to do that, why not tell me, once you've rejected the message as too long, how many characters I did type?

My only option, as far as I can see, is either to delete the message bit by bit and keep on trying to submit it, or to manually count all the characters in the message. This is nuts, it's crazy, and it's the most infuriating piece of interaction design I've come across for a good little while.

Now, if only I had a pistol....

Is you interface or website already lost in the first blink?

I've recently been reading a fascinating book. It's by Malcolm Gladwell, and it's called Blink.

The thrust of the book, if I've understood it correctly, is that your subconscious makes decisions very quickly, all by itself. This is absolutely vital for our survival - you couldn't for instance, make a rational decision about whether to step out of the way of a speeding car.

Your subconscious makes these decisions based on a number if things, including the experience you've had before (so if you learn about something for years you're likely to make better intuitive decisions), and things that have just happened to you (if you do an exercise with lots of 'polite' triggers, you'll be more polite straight afterwards). And, as people we can't even explain the decisions we've taken: we'll make up explanations that aren't, in fact, even true.

Now this is an interesting book in its own right, but it also got me thinking about how people's instinctive responses to interfaces and other interactive devices might affect what they think of them and how they use them. It took me back to the presentation I saw by Alastair Sutcliffe, described in an earlier post, that went into the ways in which people's views on aesthetics informed their decisions on how usable they thought products were.

The question I asked myself was: have users intuitively made decisions (right or wrong) about an interactive product before they start to use it?

'Blink' suggests that these first impressions can be very long-lasting and difficult to overturn. So how could an experiment be devised to test whether your products can be made more or less usable purely by manipulating the blink?

Perhaps you could show users a one or two second snapshot of a site and ask them to rate it, and then go through a normal usability test and ask them to rate it again. Would there be any correlation between these two ratings? Could that correlation be explained another way?

Perhaps you could perform this exact same experiment again, but this time switch the sites that the real usability test is performed on, so that the site you see for the snapshot is not the site that you do the test on. If there was still a correlation between the two ratings.....

I don't know. Maybe there's a much better experiment than this that could be devised (and, better, actually perform). But even as an idea to lodge in your mind, the idea that the first few moments of a users interaction could be fundamental to the rest of their experience is an interesting one.