Needles and Plastic: Information design for the time poor

Information design for the time poor

08 March 2007

Information design, or more specifically interface design, helps us time poor individuals survive in the modern world.

I realised this the other day I when showed my colleague Bruce the new Windows Media Player 11.

For some time I'd not bothered too much with Media Player, because v. 9 drove me nuts for its poor usability (all those split windows reminded me of HTML framesets and they were just as horrible to use - urgh!) and doing stuff I didn't want. All the talk about problems with digital media rights put me off upgrading to v. 10, so I put up with v. 9 at work, but used other media players at home.

Recently someone at work showed me v. 11 and said they thought it was much improved. So I installed it and was surprised to find it was much better to use.

When I showed it to Bruce, he commented that it did look better, but did it show you a track list while running in compact mode? I'd forgotten that was how he preferred to use it, and sure enough, when we looked, v. 11 didn't either.

Thinking about this later, I realised I didn't know the answer to his question because:

I used the interface differently than him, and
I really wasn't aware of all the features in the software.

There was a time when I used to know all the features of the software I used. Not only were there fewer features, but I was one of those normans who liked to explore new software, discovering and trying out all the features, so I would know the software inside and out. I felt I needed to do that to be able to use the tool. Now I don't. Why?

In part it is because there are so many features in software these days - compare Word 6 with Word 2003 for instance, but I think it is more than this.

I think software has now become part of the current information overload phenomena, in that not only does most software do more than we actually need or use, but we have so many types of software now. Software for creating documents (notice it's not word processing anymore), programs for creating and managing data, tools for storing, creating and editing images, things for organising us and our stuff, things for storing our stuff, and more. And the expectations on many of us in our work places and homes to be able to use these things is high.

Of course with these new fangled online office applications and storage facilities (Google, Zoho, ThinkFree, gOFFICE, and many more) we have a whole different way of working with these tools to deal with.

All these software tools are created by different people who have different ideas about interfaces and the way they should work.

I don't have time now to spend discovering all the intricacies in most of the information tools I use. I need to get something done right now, and so I discover as I go. To do this, I need things to be easy to use, to be intuitive, and possibly familiar to other things I've used.

Because of this emphasis on action and immediacy, there may well be features in many of the products and software I use, that I never use or discover. I'm told the new Office 2007 has few new features, but the interfaces for Word, Excel, etc have been completely re-designed, based on feedback that users keep requesting features that have existed for several versions. Obviously the interface was getting in the way of people finding the feature they wanted.

Good information design is often about being involved in many aspects of the design of something, but the key is being user-orientated. People today work and live in environments that are short on time and high on complexity. Provide a tool or information product that works the way the user will expect it to work, and you're likely to be on to a winner.

Labels: information design