Bruce Tognazzini on Human-Computer Interaction

Bruce Tognazzini was Apple's 66th employee, developing the company's first usability guidelines and founding its Human Interface team. Almost thirty years later, he's a principal at Nielsen Norman Group and still making his feelings known when companies commit design errors. Here, 'Tog' gives us a variety of thoughts on interface design, freedom, the future of computing, the iPhone's place in world history and why he travels around in a 400 sq ft motorhome while towing a 4x4 and two Segways.


- What is the main usability/user experience mistake you see on the web?

The level of open hostility that websites display is breathtaking. For every Bed, Bath & Beyond, with its smooth, comfortable user experience, there are a thousand amateurish websites that appear to feel that torturing their customers is a really good idea. In the main, this has resulted from striving to achieve mediocrity, rather than excellence, but it is as devastating to the user experience as if they had set out to achieve hostility.

The worst single fault is throwing away the user’s work. You see this in travel sites, where the user spends an hour selecting airline tickets for dates five months hence, then tries searching for a hotel for that same period, only to find the site has thrown away the dates and is assuming the user wants a hotel for tomorrow night. The customer playing “what if” with different airlines and different hotels may have to enter the same group of dates as many as a dozen times during these transactions - often resulting in their making a mistake the last, fateful time, and ending up with worthless airline tickets for the wrong dates.

Then there’s the worst single bit of information that can be discarded: the user’s decision to uncheck the box saying, “Yes! I want you to spam me fourteen times a day for the rest of my life!” that appears embedded in the order page. Go back to change anything on that page, and they’ll turn the checkbox back on. How do these people imagine customers feel later when the spam they specifically rejected starts rolling in?


- You recently blogged about how sites can speed up 'subjective time' for users. Could you expand on that?

* Rid your site of time-dependent media. Specifically, eliminate all Flash and video that is not specifically directed at the product or service being sold or discussed and that is not under the direct and voluntary control of the user.
* Support tabbed browsing.
* Limit the number of pages and interactions necessary for a user to accomplish his or her task.
* Do “boredom testing", where you observe new and experienced users and see where they fidgit, their mind and eyes wander, or they sit back with arms crossed.
* Work out solutions so that when you must do some work “behind the scenes", the user is engaged in decision-making and doesn’t miss your presence. Use Firefox’s ability to pre-fetch pages, for example, so when the user is ready to go, you are ready to go, too.


- What are your thoughts on the user experience offered by different video ad formats, including pre-rolls and Google /YouTube's animated overlays ?

Users hate them, of course, but that’s not the point, the bottom line is. As long as users will put up with it, it will continue unabated. “Users” have been putting up with so-called “free” TV, with its barrage of ads, for sixty years, even though they are paying for the ads through increased product costs, just as they are paying for YouTube through increased product costs.


- Do any of your early guidelines on human interface design still hold true today?

The following are guidelines, verbatim, from my 1980 edition of the Apple II Guidelines:
* Everything the program expects the user to do should feel intuitively right. The user should feel comfortable within the program, and the program should respond to the user's best guess of the right thing to do at any given moment.
* The program should anticipate as much as possible the needs and questions of the user and be prepared to handle them as they arise.
* User interfaces should always be designed with the end user in mind: the ideal interface for a preschooler is radically different from that for a corporate executive.
* There is a trade-off in program design between making a program easy to learn and making it quick and easy to use later on. A program used once should have considerable design effort spent in making it tutorial in nature ... a program used every-day-all-day should be terse, allowing the experienced user speed and flexibility.
* Screens should be kept as simple as possible. * Unnecessary verbiage and superfluous graphics should be avoided.
* Inputs should be tolerant and forgiving. [They] should recognise and parse the most natural and widest range of possible responses.

Associated Link: Full Interview: Bruce Tognazzini on human-computer interaction

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