Who's for clutter and distraction?
A few weeks ago, The Register featured an article entitled Information is the UI in Windows 8, says design guru. I read the article 3-4 times and still have no idea what the eponymous design guru (Shane Morris) was on about, but the comments on the article reminded me of one or two battles I've fought and lost over user interfaces. I was reminded of this again while trying to disable a particularly annoying feature of LibreOffice the other night.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool minimalist. I detest desktops full of icons; I fight constant battles against Windows programs that want to add themselves to prominent places on the "Start" menu, task bar and desktop; and I despise Gnome and KDE for emulating Windows. (For the record, I prefer Fluxbox.)
There is obviously a certain amount of personal preference here, but the comments on The Register's article make it clear that I'm not the only one. A few commenters mention the infamous <blink> HTML tag. When it was first developed, it presumably seemed like a good way of emphasising text. However, people rapidly discovered that blinking text distracted readers from the rest of the web page.
Google's home page is, I think, a legendary piece of web design. It replaced the complicated and distracting interfaces of Altavista, HotBot, et al., with an interface that gets right to the point of what people want from a search engine: a "search" box. Yet web designers -- apparently unaware of Google's success -- continue to stuff their sites full of links, images, Flash, Javascript and all the rest.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that the way to make a good user interface is to add as many buttons, sidebars, animations and other doodads as possible. So why do well-known web sites like Bigpond and NineMSN seem to do exactly this?
The obvious answer is "feature-itis", the process by which software gains features that seem good in themselves but whose over-abundance as a whole detracts from the comprehensibility and usability of the software. It's easy to say that some software or a web site should provide such-and-such a feature, and usually easy enough for a software developer to make the feature happen. But the proponent of a feature is unlikely to admit that it isn't that important and can be relegated to a second-level menu.
One of the pieces of information that I used to resolve my problem with LibreOffice illustrates this. A user of similar mind to me complained that the section title tooltip displayed by LibreOffice when scrolling through a document is "distracting and annoying". In response, Roman Eisele asserts that "some people will find this tooltip useful". So, on the strength of some unidentified people who might conceivably like this feature, Roman suggests resolving the original user's complaint with a feature that allows anti-tooltip users to disable the scrolling tooltip without disabling all tooltips (which is what I had to do in order to disable a feature that, for me, makes LibreOffice virtually unusable.)
I suppose there must be people who like interfaces that I find cluttered: plenty of computers have them. According to the November 2012 issue of APC Magazine (p. 57), Microsoft decided to remove the "Start" menu from Windows 8 in part because users "were pinning their favourite apps to the taskbar instead," which I consider to make for a very cluttered taskbar. By way of pleasing these users, the Interface Formerly Known As Metro seems to pile icons onto the screen in exactly the way that I hate most. Mind you, most of APC's writers seem to have grave doubts about it, too. I wonder if Microsoft has also checked that those users weren't just pinning icons to the taskbar because the "Start" menu itself is a bastion of uncontrollable clutter?
