Section 3.5. Minimal Affordances

SMS Interaction Design Considerations > Minimal Affordances

3.5. Minimal Affordances

In user interface design, an affordance is a clue to a user that a given action or behavior is possible. However, as Grady Leno of http://Phonesherpa.com put it, text messaging is a lot like playing Zork:

>You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
>There is a small mailbox here.
What are you supposed to do? Look around?
>I don't understand that

When you're staring at your phone, there is very little interface available to tell you what to do. No blue underlined hyperlinks, beveled Submit buttons, or labeled fields, just a blank text message input form.

Consequently, the need for your interface to be as intuitive as possible is very high; it's critical that your users' first guess regarding how to get something done (or what can be done) be right.

The first strategy for increasing the intuitiveness of your interface is to leverage existing syntaxes. The Microformats wiki has a good list of standards being used for SMS and command line interfaces at http://microformats.org/wiki/picoformats. For example, many services give the user the option of silencing incoming messages, but not all in the same way (see Table 3-1).

Table 3-1. How to silence incoming messages
  Dodgeball Twitter Slam Facebook Mixd
Stop messaging tonight option Off N/A N/A N/A N/A
Stop messages indefinitely option stop off .off off stop all


As you can see, there is some convergence, but no standardization to syntax. Accepting multiple inputs to mean the same thing may be a necessary mitigation.

NOTE

Whether you decide to use "stop" or "off" as your "official" means of turning off messages, it's important to make it very easy for users to ask not to be disturbed anymore, not just because it's the respectful thing to do, but because carriers may not allow you to operate a service on their network if you don't.

Don't be surprised if you're required to support "stop," "quit," "leave," "unsubscribe," and "unsub" as means of hushing up.

A second strategy involves providing affordances in all or selective outgoing messages. Dodgeball appends the instruction reply with "@venue name" to check-in when users check-in and Reply to xxx-xxx-xxxx to say hi when users send a non-location "shout." A more generic Send ? for help can let a curious user know what her options are...in only 15 characters.

NOTE

Dennis Crowley, a Dodgeball co-founder, reports:

We saw a big spike in usage when we added [reply with "@venue name" to check-in]. Receiving a check-in became a "me too" call to action rather than just a reminder.

A great reminder of how suggestible users are. They've never used your service before. Don't be afraid to tell them what to do.

 

 



How to Build an SMS Service
How to Build an SMS Service
ISBN: 789742233
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 52
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