programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I was lucky enough to attend a week-long Human Factors International session on usability a few years ago*. As a developer with a long term interest in getting to the human root cause of so many programming problems, I loved it. One of the freebies from the course was this button:
It's excellent advice. I still have this button clipped to my mug boss to periodically remind me that, no matter how cool the feature may be, if users can't find it – or understand it – you're wasting your time. So make sure you have your priorities in order before you start: usability first, feature second.
Jensen Harris provided a striking example of this phenomenon in action today:
One of the most startling and consistent pieces of feedback we've received from the early deployments of Office 2007 Beta 1 has been: "It's great that you added the drawing tools to all of the Office programs! Now I don't need to create the drawings in PowerPoint and copy them into Word/Excel/Outlook..."Surprised? I certainly was.
While the drawing and graphics engine has certainly been massively improved in Office 2007, the same basic drawing capabilities have been available in Word/Excel/PowerPoint since Office 97. Yet, again and again we hear stories about people assiduously creating drawings in PowerPoint and copying them over piece by piece into their Word or Excel document. I remember during a site visit watching a man create a simple flowchart in Excel which should have taken 3 minutes actually take 15 minutes because of all of the cross-application, clipboard, and windowing work it took to keep moving shapes between the apps.
When is a ten year old feature suddenly a "new" feature? When users can actually find it!
* HFI also has a great technical reference section on their site, which includes the archives of their UI Design Newsletter back to 1998. It's worth checking out if you haven't done so already.
It's not just a question of knowing the controls are there. At least in Office 2000, the drawing controls in Word are significantly less powerful than those in PowerPoint. And Visio 2000 Pro schematics (and, I think, flowcharts) look pretty crappy to me compared with what I can do in PowerPoint or FrameMaker. Visio does a better job of allowing you to drag stuff around with connectors attached, but that is a poor tradeoff if you can't get the basic appearance that you want.
"... why was he making a flowchar in Excel?!"
1. There are times and places where a full blown Visio diagram is overkill. A quick and dirty Excel/Word/PP flowchart gets the job done.
2. (Number of people who are comfortale using Excel) (Number of people who are comfortale using Visio)
3. Visio doesn't ship with every version of Office.
As many people pointed out on Jensen's site, the simple fact that the drawing tools are "identical" across the three applications doesn't mean that the user's experience is identical. Because the PowerPoint canvas is the whole document - there are no scrolling / flowing issues, no "drawing mode" - and more importantly no "no drawing mode", it makes sense to draw in PowerPoint and paste into (especially) Word or Excel.
Carl Manaster on April 24, 2006 6:23 AM"2. (Number of people who are comfortale using Excel) (Number of people who are comfortale using Visio)" -- MTan
"A corollary is that if the user doesn't know the feature exists, it doesn't." -- Haacked
Make that :
(Number of people who know about use Excel) (Number of people who even know about Visio)
Which adds to Haacked's corollary :
If the user doesn't even know your application exists, it doesn't.
Ian Johns on April 24, 2006 12:01 PM"I remember during a site visit watching a man create a simple flowchart in Excel which should have taken 3 minutes"
... why was he making a flowchar in Excel?!
I agree with Brendan. I thought you needed Viso for flowcharts.
Ben Jones on April 24, 2006 1:07 PMA corollary is that if the user doesn't know the feature exists, it doesn't. This is where proper "affordances" come into play.
Haacked on April 24, 2006 1:53 PMThen there are the features that were present in one release but got yanked in later releases. I'm talking about the features in Windows 98, personally customizable themes and folder customization that got yanked in Windows XP. They removed folder customization entirely and now attempt to force people to use Microsoft-only themes. There's a non-Microsoft patch for uxtheme.dll, but the point is, it's hard enough to discover features without playing cloak and dagger about having them.
Apparently you've been blasted by someone with a tripod url too?
Robert Claypool on April 27, 2006 1:45 PMComments
... why was he making a flowchar in Excel?!
Brendan Kidwell
I agree with Brendan. I thought you needed Viso for flowcharts.
Ben Jones
... because he wasn't an Information Architect. He's going to use any tool he's familiar with. Even if he knew about Visio, not being the most approachable of softwares, it's something the layman would avoid at all costs.
The main reason I user PPT for flowcharts and such (pasting them into Word documents as needed) is that it snaps connectors to items so you get good lines without the manual hassle. If this is in Word, I've yet to find it, even though I've always found 8and sometimes used) the built-in drawing tool.
Jonas on January 13, 2009 1:50 AM...the drawing and graphics engine has certainly been massively improved in Office 2007...
Well, massively changed. After using it for three years now (including late alpha, beta, RTM, and SP1), I'm not convinced it's really been improved, just different.
The point about doing your graphics in one program (PowerPoint or Excel) instead of another (most notably Word, which may as well not have the drawing tools) is that some tools work better with some features than with others. Doing drawings in Word is like word processing in spreadsheet cells or in a textbox.
Jon Peltier on February 6, 2010 9:47 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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