Ramblings on User Interfaces

I recently read an interesting fact about the way men’s loo has been designed in Schiphol airport, Amsterdam. The authorities etched image of a black housefly in to each urinal. The staff of Kieboom, the economist who directs Schipol’s building expansion, found out that these etchings of fly-in-the-urinals improved the aim and reduced ‘spillage’ by 80%.

In the modern wired world, we are now increasingly moving towards ‘self service’ in banks, in buying tickets, and to file tax returns. Even in such online machine based services, there is a need to be conscious about user interface. We see some online sites which have understood the normal human habits of observation, conscious and unconscious behaviours and are very intuitive for the user. The user is able to sail through the steps in a jiffy.

Very often the techies who design the systems get carried away by the functionalities and forget the user experience. At best (with or without the help of some creative types) they fill the interface pages with some wild graphics and gadgets which instead of guiding the users distracts them. They often consider the effort needed to understand the user a pain in the wrong place.

I think one of the key contributors of the wide following of Facebook in comparison with many other social networking sites is such an intuitive experience for the user. I am sure most of us will agree that the iPod and iPhone are outstanding examples how devices designed with user experience in mind often turn out to be winners.

But if we spend time and effort to really analyze the service being offered, the nature and expectation of the various users who visit the site or even the service counters we can identify very many ways to help the user and in turn get more out of the infrastructure we have created. This may even help us to reduce our service cost.

This becomes even more important if we are servicing mostly one time users or occasional users. In such cases we really have to spend time to anticipate the confusion that comes to the user’s mind. In such cases we should have a continuous process of taking feedback from a large cross section of users to refine our offering.

We need to remind ourselves that the primary purpose of the user interface is to make the user experience a pleasure and not to prove how bright the developers are.

Let us take a look at another important dimension to designing of user interfaces. Smart user interfaces can also act as a mechanism to influence client choice, especially the default options provided. This provides an opportunity as well as a moral responsibility to the designers of the interface. Some obvious example that comes to mind is the legal requirement that the acceptance button in the user agreement for by default should not be on “I Accept”.

We don’t need legal directions to act responsible. We have to take care that the default options we provide are not detrimental for the ‘absent minded’ user. In some of the developed societies legal boundaries have been defined to a good degree. With the rapid growth in online self service counters here in India we it is high time we give attention these 'human factors'.