In Productivity and Screen Size, Jacob Nielson trashes a recent Apple survey on how fabulous large monitors are for productivity. (He doesn’t actually say he disagree’s with Apple’s results, just that their methodology was suspect).
I’m not quite sure whether the rest of the article has much to do with monitor sizes but he does say some interesting things about designing interfaces for casual users as as opposed to skilled users. He argues that very different constraints apply when you design for one group other another and furthermore there are fewer situations when you can assume your users will have time to become skilled in your interface than you would assume.
So even when you think you are designing a tool for people that will have the time and incentive to become familiar with your innovative, optimised design then there are many times when the user will be starting from scratch.
An example for me is Photoshop. Now Photoshop is such a huge program that there are many areas I rarely need to use. When I do use them, quite often that part of the interface has been revised since the version of Photoshop I was using when I last went there. So despite using Photoshop pretty much every day for something or the other, there are times when I am a newbie. I like to hone my skills so I will try and learn something new in these situations but in many cases the clock is ticking and I just have to get results quickly.
Everyone is both a power-user and a newbie at different times. The cases where a tool or a piece of software can guarantee it will only be used by power-users or people learning to become power-users is fairly uncommon.
So ideally software should have lead you gently in but get the hell out of the way for people who already know what they are doing. Context senstive help, wizards, tooltips and interfaces that have ways of hiding advanced features*Â all help in this.
* howver hiding/changing parts of the interface to simplify things for new users can also hinder the ability to discover new features by exploring the screen as well as negating the benefits of motor memory. (i would describe motor memory in this context as the process where you learn to quickly move to the correct button/icon/control by habit much quicker than you would be able to locate it by conscious action)
Alan Cooper writes about the “Perpetual Intermediate” (In ‘The Inmates are Running the Asylum’):
“The experience of people using interactive systems—as in most things—tends to follow the classic bell curve of statistical distribution. For any silicon-based product, if we graph the number of users against their particular skill level, there wiill be a few beginners on the left side, a few experts on the right, and a preponderance of intermediate users in the center.
But statistics don’t tell the whole story. This is a snapshot frozen in time, and while most people—the intermediates—tend to stay in that category for a long time, the people on the extreme ends of the curve—the beginners and experts—are always changing. The difficulty of maintaining a high level of expertise means that experts come and go rapidly. Beginners, on the left side of the curve, change even more rapidly.
Although everybody spends some minimum time as a beginner, nobody remains in that state for long. That’s because nobody likes to be a beginner, and it is never a goal. People don’t like to be incompetent, and beginners—by definition—are incompetent. Conversely, learning and improving is natural, rewarding, and lots of fun, so beginners become intermediates very quickly. For example, it’s fun to learn tennis, but those first few hours or days, when you can’t return shots and are hitting balls over the fence are frustrating. After you have learned basic racket control, and aren’t spending all of your time chasing lost balls, you really move forward. That state of beginnerhood is plainly not fun to be in, and everybody quickly passes through it to some semblance of intermediate adequacy. If, after a few days, you still find yourself whacking balls around the tennis court at random, you will abandon tennis and take up fly-fishing or stamp collecting.
The occupants of the beginner end of the curve will either migrate into the center bulge of intermediates, or they will drop off of the graph altogether and find some activity in which they can migrate into intermediacy. However, the population of the graph’s center is very stable. When people achieve an adequate level of experience and ability, they generally stay there forever. Particularly with high cognitive friction products, users take no joy in learning about them. So they learn just the minimum and then stop. Only Homo Logicus finds learning about complex systems to be fun.”
Oh god. That makes me Homo Logicus.