On Jun 17, 2008, at 7:08 PM, Jeff Howard wrote:
One of the best reasons I know of to use an alphabetical organization is where egos are concerned--specifically to avoid the appearance of priority when listing names. In that case it's akin to random; the names have to be in _some_ order and it helps to cast the blame on the "natural order" of the alphabet.
If your primary goal for design is to ensure you can cleanly assign blame to an artifact, then I guess alphabetization is good. However, the original context of this thread was for the organization of office supplies. Do people need to ensure that all office supplies are treated equally?
Surely, if you want to ensure users get what they need, you'll approach things from their perspective, not from the perspective of whose egos you need to protect. It's clear, watching users, that they are less concerned about equality and fairness in design than by ease of accessing their information.
Company employee phone directory: Alphabetize. (Except that important departments or individuals should probably also be at the top in a "best bets" section.) Company HR Department services: Put in order of most likely needed by the employee. Alphabetization here, while fair, would not help the user in any way.
Incidently, literal randomness is a pretty good organization scheme in some contexts; notably survey questions where the order of answers tends to influence selection.
No argument there. I never said randomness is bad. I only said that alphabetization, to users, appears random. If randomness is the effect you are going for, alphabetization is a good way to do it.
But in most cases I'd say alphabetical is preferable to random (if nothing else exists) because people want things to make sense and they'll try to read meaning into the order no matter what you do. It's more humane to give them something obvious like alphabetical order to hang their hat on.
I'm betting that if you had watched as many users approach as many different alphabetized lists as I have in my career, you'd probably come to a different conclusion.
In my experience, when users come to a list that alphabetized that isn't a lists of people's names, state's names, or models of cars, they try to find the item they are looking for by starting at the top and working down. As soon as they bump into an item they think is less significant than their target, they pause and wonder how they might've missed the item. This is particularly true if they find something that they think of as similar significance that should be a "neighbor" of the target item.
They don't keep looking because they think it couldn't be later on (or they make a comment about how they don't want to have to scan the entire list just to find their one item). The problem with alphabetization is that it eliminates grouping of neighbors and randomizes the significance. Users aren't interested in searching. They are interested in finding.
Order is really important. You need to really understand how user's approach it. Most of the time, alphabetization diminishes the experience instead of enhancing it, from the users' perspective.
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