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If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

blog.maxrudberg.com

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Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#31

Post by enraged_camel »

zbowling wrote: post #13

This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown! Lots and lots of demos to re-enforce the action and get users accustom to a thing is fine if that experience doesn't frustrate the user and they can get up to speed using the app quickly. If you are choosing neat new ways of communicating and changing the way the user interacts with the app for the sake of being ne…

>>This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown!

I'm not so sure about that. My grandmother, who certainly had not seen an iPad or iPhone in action before (she's 85, doesn't speak English and doesn't watch TV), figured it out within one minute of using my iPad for the first time yesterday.

If you think about the pinching movement, the distance between your thumb and index finger correlates to the size of the object. Increase that distance and the object grows in size (i.e. you zoom in). And vice versa. This is what I'd like to call "hyper-intuitive" and is the kind of thing people can figure out without being trained on it.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#32

Post by swampthing »

andybak wrote: post #29
ary wrote: post #6

This is utter nonsense. Spend even a small amount of time with someone who works outside of the computer hardware/software industry and observe how and why they use a smart phone or computer. UI walkthroughs are not only necessary, but desired. They act as the equivalent of standing next to someone and "showing" them how something works. As the OP correctly notes there is a very heavy reliance on mimicry for most lea…

People skip tutorials and walkthoughs just like people don't read the Help. Discoverability needs to be layered. Come over and watch my Dad use your app. It's astonishing how much we take for granted.

People learn things differently. Plenty of people skip tutorials and walkthroughs, but plenty of people also study those things like you wouldn't believe. There's no one right way to do this - you just have to try and cover your bases for each type of learning style.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#33

Post by lnanek2 »

There's a lot of posts here against this article. If you do metrics on tutorials, tons of people skip. Even if you don't allow skip, a lot of people are just going to plow through ignoring a lot. Heck, lots of people leave the app entirely and never come back. I've seen this in my own games.

Tutorials just aren't very fun. That's why games so often have to sort of build the tutorial into the gameplay somehow, make it more piecemeal and interactive. Which is what the article is getting at. So you can think of it more as "don't make crappy boring tutorials" like popups and step by step screenshots.

User studies with web sites have show users search pages/sites just enough to find something that sounds vaguely like their current goal. They don't analyze the entire thing and read every link and then make a decision. Showing a bunch of images and a next button is sort of forcing them to do that, but it won't stick and they won't like it.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#34

Post by jblock »

Extravagant headline. UI cues are the same thing as a walkthrough. They're a channel for the designer to tell the user how to interact with something--a communicative affordance. The only difference is that they're not listed as bullet points.

We have to learn how to ride a bike and type on a computer. The user doesn't know how to do everything, nor do they have the intuitive reasoning to pick up and use something completely new and alien. While we should make them feel smart, there's room to teach them and make them feel enlightened with this new system. Contextually, a UI walkthrough may or may not be a good idea.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#35

Post by zbowling »

enraged_camel wrote: post #31
zbowling wrote: post #13

This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown! Lots and lots of demos to re-enforce the action and get users accustom to a thing is fine if that experience doesn't frustrate the user and they can get up to speed using the app quickly. If you are choosing neat new ways of communicating and changing the way the user interacts with the app for the sake of being ne…

>>This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown! I'm not so sure about that. My grandmother, who certainly had not seen an iPad or iPhone in action before (she's 85, doesn't speak English and doesn't watch TV), figured it out within one minute of using my iPad for the first time yesterday. If you think about the pinching movement, the distance between your thum…

It's situational and experience plays into intuition.

For example, I gave my mom a Microsoft Surface tablet I was lent for RT dev this weekend. It was in the classic desktop but I had a mapping webpage open in IE that responded to most touch gestures.

Because it was in the classic desktop, my mom was using her past experience and thinking of her finger as a mouse and hitting the little "+" icon to zoom in.

Not very "hyper-intuitive".

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#37

Post by notatoad »

andybak wrote: post #29
ary wrote: post #6

This is utter nonsense. Spend even a small amount of time with someone who works outside of the computer hardware/software industry and observe how and why they use a smart phone or computer. UI walkthroughs are not only necessary, but desired. They act as the equivalent of standing next to someone and "showing" them how something works. As the OP correctly notes there is a very heavy reliance on mimicry for most lea…

People skip tutorials and walkthoughs just like people don't read the Help. Discoverability needs to be layered. Come over and watch my Dad use your app. It's astonishing how much we take for granted.

Some people skip through tutorials and rely on discoverability, others are lost without a tutorial no matter how discoverable your features are. Written introductions are comforting, You need to accommodate both learning styles.

With a recent project I watched a few totally inept testers discover all the features with no problems, but after launching it became clear that most of our power users were not discovering features. A quick bit of intro text and everybody is happy.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#38

Post by ebf »

enraged_camel wrote: post #31
zbowling wrote: post #13

This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown! Lots and lots of demos to re-enforce the action and get users accustom to a thing is fine if that experience doesn't frustrate the user and they can get up to speed using the app quickly. If you are choosing neat new ways of communicating and changing the way the user interacts with the app for the sake of being ne…

>>This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown! I'm not so sure about that. My grandmother, who certainly had not seen an iPad or iPhone in action before (she's 85, doesn't speak English and doesn't watch TV), figured it out within one minute of using my iPad for the first time yesterday. If you think about the pinching movement, the distance between your thum…

To continue using the iPhone as an example, I realized that after two years, my Dad never realized that double clicking brings up the app switcher. I agree that it is better if you don't need a walkthrough, but I wouldn't say that you "blew it" if your app needs one. If a 30 second tutorial let's the user do very powerful and intuitive things, things that may save the user time over the long run, than maybe it is okay.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#39

Post by enraged_camel »

ebf wrote: post #38
enraged_camel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>This is wrong. How the hell did we learn "pinch to zoom" on the iPhone/iPad was a thing? We were shown! I'm not so sure about that. My grandmother, who certainly had not seen an iPad or iPhone in action before (she's 85, doesn't speak English and doesn't watch TV), figured it out within one minute of using my iPad for the first time yesterday. If you think about the pinching movement, the distance between your thum…

To continue using the iPhone as an example, I realized that after two years, my Dad never realized that double clicking brings up the app switcher. I agree that it is better if you don't need a walkthrough, but I wouldn't say that you "blew it" if your app needs one. If a 30 second tutorial let's the user do very powerful and intuitive things, things that may save the user time over the long run, than maybe it is oka…

Not really. The app switcher is not the only way to switch apps. In fact, it is the more difficult of the two. It makes you click the home button twice, then tap the app you want once - versus click the home button once, and then the app you want once. Three clicks/taps versus two. As such, it is not a huge deal at all that it is not intuitive.

Same thing with double-tap to zoom. Not terribly intuitive, but that's not a big deal because there's a "hyper-intuitive" way to zoom. Double-tap becomes necessary only in very specific situations where only the hand holding the phone is free - which is not very common.

Re: If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

#40

Post by dasil003 »

jessaustin wrote: post #21
dasil003 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car is a much narrower use case than app.

Could you explain this statement? Do you mean that more people drive cars than use a particular app, or do you mean the opposite? Something else entirely?

I mean the core UI for all cars serves the same purpose: to make the car move. The functionality of the car (lame dash apps notwithstanding) is also confined to a very simple use case.

App functionality and theoretical purpose is by contrast infinite. Therefore it's easier to pass judgement on car designers when they do crazy inscrutable interfaces because it's generally a solved problem, whereas with apps there are many more valid reasons to try something new.

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