It s Intuitive Trust Me

It’s Intuitive! Trust Me!

Maybe I’ll just quit using a computer. My life would be so much easier. But considering computers are supposed to simplify our lives, instead of quitting, I’m going to help you learn to create software that is not plagued with these problems so that we can all enjoy our computers (for hours on end, of course, unable to peel ourselves away). And to get the ball rolling, I want you to consider the following statement:

“Our software is intuitive.”

This is not a direct quote by some marketing guy creating advertising copy for a circa-1985 computer magazine (although it might as well be). Instead, I made it up, but it’s indicative of a mindset common among software developers, even to this day. We want to believe that our software is intuitive, whatever that means. Early in the days of personal computers, people bragged that their software was intuitive. People said the Macintosh was intuitive. The Amiga computer created by Commodore had a graphical user interface system that was named Intuition.

Various dictionaries give different definitions of intuition, but a common thread is that if you have to use your intuition, you are using a part of your brain where you don’t need your cognitive and reasoning abilities. Yee-ikes! After reading that, I’d be terribly hesitant to suggest that my software is intuitive, because being intuitive would be a major thing to live up to. I’d hate to see my software put to the test: Send it off to a deserted island and hand it to Mr. Robinson, who has been stranded there since 1975, living, quite happily and healthily, off of the local flora, without any computers. Hand him a computer equipped with Microsoft Windows XP, and put him to work using my (ahem) intuitive software program, without me giving him any instructions whatsoever.

I can see it now. Assuming Mr. Robinson doesn’t smash open the computer and tear out the parts and build a two-way radio (not intuitive, but definitely ingenious), I seriously doubt he would be able to figure out my program. In fact, I can see him getting frustrated and yelling at it the same way I did when I started my day. (While knowing how to use computers might not be hardwired into our brain, I strongly suspect getting mad at computers is hardwired.)

Okay, I think that pretty much drives home the point that we’re deceiving ourselves to think we’re building intuitive software. However, I would argue that we are constantly encountering things in our software experience that is counterintuitive, that is, stuff that simply doesn’t make sense.

Consider the scrollbars, for example. Right now, as I type, I have a big Word document open, with several pages. I look over and I see a scrollbar. I am about to use that little work of wonder to scroll back to the previous page. Now in my mind, I can imagine what it will look like as I move the scrollbar’s thumb down: The text will all move downward. The entire document will fall closer to the ground and soon the top of it will be at my eye level. And so I go over to the scrollbar and move the scrollbar down.

Right. In reality, if I move the scrollbar down, the text moves up—the text goes in the opposite direction. Does that make sense? Not particularly at first. But what does make sense is when you use a bit more cognition and logic and instead realize that the thumb of the scrollbar represents the position in the document. To go to the top of the document, I move the thumb to the top of the scrollbar. To go to the bottom of the document, I move the thumb to the bottom. At first my intuition might have told me one thing (or maybe not), and what really happened was quite different and required a bit of logic mixed with experience. Figure 1.1 shows the relative positions of the scrollbar within two identical documents.

Figure 1.1: When the scrollbar’s thumb is at the top, the document is at the top. When the thumb is in the middle, the middle of the document is in view.

And now when I press Enter at the end of a document, due to the current formatting selection, my insertion point automatically gets indented. That way, each paragraph has a nice half-inch indentation. Well that’s fine and dandy, but what happens if I press the Up-arrow key? As I might expect, the insertion point goes pretty much straight up so it’s sitting between two characters about a half inch into the last line of the previous paragraph.

But now I press the Home key so the insertion point goes to the left edge of the paragraph. And then I press the Down-arrow key, so I’m back where I originally started, indented in, ready to type a brand new paragraph. And again I press the Up-arrow key just as I did a few moments ago. But this time, the insertion point doesn’t go straight up! It goes up to the next line up as expected, but instead moves all the way over to the left.

Again this might at first seem counterintuitive. Sometimes the Up-arrow moves the insertion point straight up, and sometimes it moves the insertion point up and to the leftmost edge of the paragraph. But logic and reasoning come in, and I realize that the reason is that Microsoft Word is smart and decides whether to move the insertion point straight up or up and to the left based on my previous keystrokes.

Clearly, intuitive computer software exists only in a fantasyland. But fortunately, you, as a software designer, can at least expect that certain idioms exist. In other words, you can be assured that the people using your program—for better or for worse—have certain expectations when it comes to using computers. And you, as a software designer, would have the happiest customers (and fewest angry e-mails) if you stick to these idioms. In the next section, I talk all about what exactly an idiom is and how, if you recognize idioms, you will have a software package that people will love.

Imagine Changing the Scrollbar’s Direction

Want to really upset your users? Why bother trying to make your users happy when you could have some fun with them? Imagine the amused looks on their faces if you wrote a hack that reverses the functionality of all the scrollbars on a single computer. To scroll the text up, these new scrollbars require that you move the thumb up—not down as is the norm. To scroll the text down, move the thumb down. To get to the beginning of the document, move the scrollbar all the way to the bottom. And so on.

I’m sure the people you did this to would laugh and get a big kick out of it. They would want to meet you because you’re so clever and they would invite you out to dinner and even pay for your meal!

Doubtful. We humans have a strange behavior when it comes to computers. The most relaxed, happy-go-lucky Homo sapiens will quickly turn into a ragingus maniacus given just the smallest computer problem. You don’t want to be in the room when this happens, and you certainly don’t want to be accused of writing the software that caused this extreme flow of adrenaline. Therefore, I suggest for your safety and for the mental well-being of your fellow humans that you stick to the norms when it comes to designing software. The psychiatrists of the world will thank you in the end.