David Cantrell wrote:
"It's what everyone else does" *is* the principle of least surprise.
That's getting the cause and effect backwards. There's lots of fucked up
interfaces and user behaviors out there, just dig into Windows Linux GUI apps
for examples, and some of them exhibit astonishing behavior. Often times
users go right along with it because they've been trained to accept it. Many
Unix shell utilities have this tendency.
And your statement implies that user expectations come solely from rote
experience. I don't want to get into a whole UI design explanation right now,
but let me just say it's not true. There's a whole world of ways to make an
interface conform to expectations, and to control those expectations. Ways
that work even though few people do it that way. Ways that aren't that hard
to learn.
If "do what everyone else does" is one's driving design mantra then interfaces
are simply being copied. Cargo-culting. There's a lot of crap out there and
if one doesn't really know what makes a good interface, they're just doing
what everybody else does and one can't separate the good from the bad.
More likely one copies the interfaces one has experience with which isn't even
"what everyone else does" but it feels like it. This leads to the feeling
that you're writing a good interface, it's what you're used to. It can
explain why people will argue vehemently for broken interfaces: they learned
by rote, it's what they're used to and they don't have the facilities to
evaluate the interface subjectively. It "feels" right.
In the end, the Principle of Least Surprise is just a rule of thumb to look
for flaws in an existing interface. It's not terribly accurate since what
surprises the designer is very different from what surprises the user ("makes
perfect sense to me"). That gets into designer vs user models and more than I
want to go into right now.
--
44. I am not the atheist chaplain.
-- The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army
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