Design Nirvana
Deanna Brown Aho
Perhaps this has happened to you. You use a public restroom and move to the sink to wash your hands. The sink is there. The faucet is there. But there are no knobs for the hot and cold water. “Wait a minute,” you think to yourself. “How do I turn on the water? Oh yeah, this is one of those motion sensor sinks. I just wave my hands under here and voila!”
We have all been conditioned to think that knobs must be turned to make water come out of a faucet; it’s a convention. Knobs come in all shapes and sizes, but we can usually manage them without a thought. But what if the knobs were across the room? Or under the sink? Or gone all together? That might take a while to figure out. Any change in the way we’re used to using something challenges us -- we get discombobulated.
User-centered design is the art of not discombobulating the user. User-centered design is intuitive. It is achieved when a thing functions as one expects so one can use it easily, without a thought.
A motion sensor sink is an example of an up-and-coming convention. We feel slightly thrown off each time we approach a motion sensor, but we’ll outgrow that as we become conditioned. Eventually we’ll laugh at how primitive we were to ever have had to turn knobs at all. And, oh, all the germs on those knobs! How could we ever have been so unclean?
Interface design should be user-centered for the same reason a faucet’s design should be user-centered; people will be using it. And they will be approaching it with their human brains and a lifetime of conditioning.
Not everyone will have the same conditioning and approach to your interface because not everyone has had the same experiences. Some of the factors that contribute to forming our perceptions and habits are age, education, computer experience, place of origin, etc. Obviously this list is endless. To successfully design for your user you must know your user; you must determine which of these factors is relevant to the particular user experience you are trying to create. For instance, if you are designing for senior citizens one of the factors you would want to consider is their aging eyes and have that information inform the decisions you make regarding type size. Seniors are also usually not as computer savvy as younger generations. Remember, they have not had the years of computer exposure to condition them to reading a monitor or clicking a mouse. For that reason, an interface that is uncomplicated and uncluttered would likely be better.
Every website planning manual will urge you to list your goals for a project. That’s important, but it’s only half the story. Your goals for creating a website are often very different from a site visitor’s goals. When the people installed the motion sensor sinks, their goal was probably to provide something durable and low maintenance. Maybe they even wanted to reduce the spread of germs. You might have the germ issue in common, but your motivation to use the motion sensor sink is to get clean hands. If the sinks were durable and low maintenance, but you couldn’t figure out how to “turn” on the water, you could not have achieved your goal. The motion sensor sink is a case of both the developers’ and the users’ needs being met. This is design nirvana.
