I have recently discovered a passion for design — especially the kind that can be done in software — and so I have been paying a bit more attention to various concepts and ideas pertaining to the field. Today I was called into a meeting to discuss the changes required to make a particular user dialog more… user-friendly. A great time to put theory to practice1.
I am positively impressed when one hour of a day is spent thinking aloud over how to finely tune what the user sees. Some might think it detracts from building features in the application, and in some cases that is true; however, in this particular case we were dealing with a mature application. However any product, now matter how new it is, deserves care and attention on the front-end — insert cliché about user impressions and how “the interface is the application”.
The problem we dealt with today surrounded a Filter dialog, not unlike the following mock-up - Exhibit A:
The solution we came up with, though still to be subjected to some refinement, was more like Exhibit B:
It is a minor change, barely noticeable. Yet, users had trouble understanding what the plain “Select” field was about. The idea of the dialog is to allow the user to filter from a group of items only those that satisfy the given conditions. Most users — as indicated by their direct feedback — wanted to put the criteria in the first field. And the label was not helping out in any way: if anything, it would hint that “selecting” is the same as “filtering”. It is a linguistic issue, as well: French-speakers may formulate the task they are performing using a sentence structure that makes the arrangement of the UI elements far more intuitive. The equivalent form in English, although it would be grammatically correct, is not the common manner in which the task would be translated2. With the few words present originally, the application was not guiding the user enough.
Other ideas we had considered involved turning it into a question, such as “What do you want to filter?” and, keeping the second part in a similar vibe, “Filter by [Any/All] of the following”. Another thing to keep in mind (as the UI Designer, mainly) is that the change must be subtle. Some users are already familiar with the old version, and a significant UI change would confuse them. This is just as bad and must be avoided. Indeed, changes to the UI can be quite painful to pull off, as a software vendor. Just think about Office 2007 and the waves of critique Microsoft has received about the (in theory, far superior) interface, just because it was such a huge change for the users.
Any other suggestions? Remember, such systems are should be built for users, and as such, beyond the theory and principles of design, the way in which users think about the problem is paramount to solving it.
