People aren't consistent, why do we expect interactive software always to be so?
One attitude I notice is what I will call product egotism. Design critics imagine people are obsessively focused on how every part of a creation behaves, then experience a mental meltdown when the mental model they someone created was violated. The user's psychological well being is somehow dependent on the product behaving in a predetermined manner. In truth, most interactive products are used so infrequently that users never develop a mental model of that specific product. For them, the product looks a bit like one thing, and a bit like another. They may use only parts of an application or encounter pieces at different times so that they never remember what they saw before. This description doesn't hold for something used daily like Microsoft Word, but it is true for nearly everything else we produce. For example, users rarely see different screens of an application that present different error messages, so it hardly matters if how the error message is handled differs. It may make sense to handle the error the same way from a production perspective, and such consistency might be acceptable to users, and therefore recommended. But only in rare cases will users be driven to fits of frustration because of inconsistency. The user need isn't so much consistency as it is to be "familiar enough" to understand and use. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34308 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
