Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Recognition Rather Than Recall

Have you ever forgotten to take your keys when you left the house?  Or your wallet?  Or your phone?

Let me guess why.  I bet it was because they weren't in the place where you normally leave them.  Right?

Because you didn't see them, you didn't think to take them.  "Out of sight, out of mind," as they say.

So some people get in the habit of always putting these things in a place where they will see them, preferably as they walk out the door.  Then they are in your sight, and thus, in your mind.

Software user interface designers call this principle Recognition Rather Than Recall.  The basic idea is: don't make users have to remember to do (or how to do) something.  Rather, provide them some cue that they will recognize to help them along.  

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

For example, today basically all computer programs have a menu bar or toolbar somewhere.  They are a constant reminder to the user that, "hey, you can save this!" or, "hey, you can make this text bold!" or, "I hope you don't want to close me, but you can click this red X here if you really want to."  Yes, the user can recognize the button and know both that the operation exists and how to do it.

Compare that with, say, WordPerfect back in the old days.  (And by 'old days', I mean the early 90s.)  Way back then, WordPerfect was the premier word processing application.  But it didn't have the fancy-shmancy toolbars of today.  The user had to remember that the F5 key was save and F12 was quit.  Actually, those are probably not the correct keys... but that just further illustrates how hard it is for the user to remember.  

With the rise of touchscreen interfaces, I worry that we will backtrack here.  A trendy feature of such interfaces is gesture-based commands.  The problem is, if the user sees no visual cues that a command is available, he has to... ugh... remember the commands.  How exhausting!

I faced a really glaring example of this just this week.  I logged into a server running Windows Server 2012.  I needed to find a particular program.  But the normal Windows entry point to find programs, the Start button, was nowhere to be found.  There were a few icons for some applications, all of which were useless to me at the time.  I just needed to open this specific app.

Now, I'm a software engineer.  I have been using Windows for almost 20 years.  And here I was, unable to figure out how to open the application I wanted.  The visual cues I am accustomed to had vanished.  I had to do a Google search to find it.  A Google search!  It turns out, you have to move the mouse to the lower right of the screen and that opens the "Charms Bar."  Then you can access the Start screen from there.  But how is anyone supposed to know that?

But even when I got to the Start screen, I couldn't see all my programs.  Again, there was no button or visual cue about how to access them.  Again I had to consult of the wisdom of the Internet.  It turns out that on the Start screen, you have to right click and then you can access your apps.  Again, how is the user supposed to figure that out?

My point is, there is now nothing to recognize.  No button.  No visual cue of any kind.  It all relies on recall.  It's even worse when you've never done it before... as in my case with Windows Server 2012.  How can you recall what you never knew in the first place?  

3 comments:

  1. Rightly said. I guess this is not only happening in software world. I see this kind of cyclic change in human lifestyle and in many more areas.

    Good one.

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  2. Same problem! The first time I had to use Windows 8 I had to let my cursor wandering around the screen so that I could find some valuable action to be performed.
    That's why for years people have been wondering about how NOT to make your end user think!

    http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758

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  3. I do not know the feelings of mice but they are experiencing the Matrix stuff - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-plant-false-memories-in-mice-and-mice-buy-it
    May be the future version of things would have installation files for the user too.

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