The Curse of User-Hostile Design

Stephen Manes

PC World Contributing Editor Stephen Manes is the cohost of Digital Duo, a series appearing on public television stations nationwide.

Where am I? What is this place? That's what I keep wondering as I surf the Web with Compaq's new IPaq Home Internet Appliance. Turns out this appliance, which runs on Microsoft's new MSN Companion software, doesn't show you the address of the page you're on unless you got there by typing it in. Arrive via a link, and your whereabouts are unknown to you--unless you can figure out that you need to choose the Page options tab and then pick "Send this page by mail."

Speaking of mail, when you wait for yours with this device, the hourglass gives way to an animated cat or dog in the grand tradition of Microsoft Office's detested paper clip. You might prefer to do something useful while you wait, but the IPaq won't let you. Novices, apparently, can't be trusted to multitask.

Microsoft Bob All Over Again

These design howlers don't come as a shock. Despite its phalanxes of Smart Guys--or perhaps because of them--Microsoft just can't get its interfaces right. The behemoth's idea of user-friendliness amounts largely to treating novices with condescension by removing or submerging helpful tools (in the name of simplicity) and replacing them with a circus of witless cartoon characters. It's as though the company were bent upon redeeming the legacy of the hopeless botch known as Microsoft Bob.

When Microsoft originates something clever, like Internet Explorer's History folder, it soon manages to "improve" it by making it less useful. Worse, it seems to change basic interface concepts with every new release. The goofy, incomprehensible Active Desktop, once promoted with so much fanfare, has now largely disappeared. Windows Me's default look and feel are just different enough from Win 98's to be frustrating, with such irritations as the adaptive menus first seen in Office 2000. Change for its own sake is a bad idea that Microsoft can't seem to shake.

Of course, Microsoft is only the most visible design offender. Navigating through documents in Adobe's Acrobat is always an unpleasant exercise, and the company's other products tend to assume you live in a perverse Adobeland. Larry Ellison's hapless New Internet Computer does just about everything wrong, thanks to Oracle's policy of tossing underachieving Linux software into an underpowered box without doing anything to insulate users from the unhappy results. And don't get me started on the annoyances perpetrated by virtually every Web site around.

Building a Better Interface

For glimpses of what interfaces could be, check out The Humane Interface (Addison-Wesley, 2000; $25). Author Jef Raskin, responsible for many aspects of the original Apple Macintosh user interface, now believes some of those ideas were mistakes, including the desktop metaphor. Raskin also designed a machine called the Canon Cat, which flopped in 1987 but embodied concepts only now becoming trendy, such as the notion that when you sit down at a computer, you should start where you left off.

Raskin believes that user interfaces should be rethought quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Just how many keystrokes does a task require? How small can a button be before you're likely to overshoot it with the mouse? Does that error message hold any real information?

User interfaces, he believes, should be rethought from the ground up. Why should file names be central to our lives? Why must cables have confusing connectors? If we never pose such questions, interfaces will never improve.

The best recent example of a sea change in user interfaces is the Web browser, with brilliant innovations such as the Stop and Back buttons. Too bad for novices that on the IPaq, the Back icon that appears on the screen looks like the keyboard's left-arrow key--instead of matching the special key that actually performs the Back function.

But if things run true to form, the next MSN Companion release will make both the icon and the key look like the animated cat. And Microsoft will trumpet that as a breakthrough.