Human analogies and UI: the literal approach
Designers generally accept the HCI suggestion that human analogies can be useful in creating effective UI solutions. This is especially important when looking at graphical data overviews, or ‘dashboards’.
Using a human analogy in UI design is to cross the bridge between two and three dimensions. We only need to look at icons to see how useful human analogies can be: waste paper baskets, card folders, notebooks, keys, stamps. Tactile objects. I mean to say, how last century. But that’s the level of meaning we’re hanging onto in this (sort of) unfamiliar era, sick/excited about the future and digging retro like it’s going out of fashion.
The cover of the Adam Beyer / Jesper Dahlback CD here at my desk shows a Space Invaders type of arcade console. The kind of big unit you can now buy on eBay for an achingly cool six hundred quid, rehabilitated after serving 25 years-to-life in a Croydon pub.
Handsome retro like this makes me wonder if, on the desktops of the future, we’ll be seeing an iPod icon that represents music. Of course we won’t, the machine will understand what we’re after by electrotelepathy. It’ll retire all the HCI bods because there’ll be no interaction. Just in time to avoid the next age and draw on their comfortable (private) pensions like a hamster on its water bottle.
My father has been given a laptop at work. He’s sixty years old and he’s never used a computer in his life. Now he’s got to learn. I’m a bit sad, because he didn’t quite make it to retirement without being sucked into computers. He’s done a manual job (very well) his whole working life. So he’s going to need all the human analogies he can get when he comes up against the dreaded desktop.
Er, back to the point. Data overviews, otherwise known as dashboards.
As Alex Kirtland points out however, designers need to avoid excess “chartjunk”.
In other words, users want to see the data, not the graphical approach used to render it. And since we’re talking about analogies, let’s draw one with typography: the best type is that which readers don’t notice. Or in cinema, literate critics will reject a movie where overt, self-conscious styling makes the piece superficial.
It’s bad design that draws this parallel…
Then takes it as literally as this…
In the first two instances, the “soft” graphics absolutely own the layout. The data is crammed into ridiculous little dials around - and this is a triumph of banality - an array of extruded plastic “upholstery”.
In the third, an aberration against the usual trend of Mac excellence, we are looking at dials with an apparent scale of zero to one hundred. Zero to one hundred what, exactly? Well sure, but who cares with bevelling as fine as that?
The Apple approach to UI design has always been a bit of a tightrope walk between form and function, at least since the advent of more than 256 colours, anyway. It’s a tightrope walk that Apple tends to do rather well, but when we want data, it doesn’t need to be tactile.
For, as Kirtland states with admirable bluntness, “For the busy executive, quick comprehension outweighs a pretty picture every time”.
Quite.
And anyway, who says human analogies are always right?
