Ask Slashdot: When Is the User Experience Too Good? 397
gadzook33 writes "I had an interesting experience at work recently. A colleague suggested during a meeting that we were building something that would make it far too easy for the customer to perform a certain task; a task that my colleague felt was deleterious. Without going into specifics, I believe an apt analogy would be giving everyone in the country a flying car. While this would no doubt be enjoyable, without proper training and regulation it would also be tremendously dangerous (also assume training and regulating is not practical in this case). I retorted that ours is not to reason why, and that we had the responsibility to develop the best possible solution, end of story. However, in the following days I have begun to doubt my position and wonder if we don't have some responsibility to artificially 'cripple' the solution and in doing so protect the user from themselves (build a car that stays on the ground). I do not for a second imagine that I am playing the part of Oppenheimer; this is a much more practical issue and less of an ethical one. But is there something to this?"
Re:Too good? I think not (Score:3, Interesting)
Wordpress has a 'shoot-yourself-in-the-foot' option in the admin settings. You can just enter a path to point your entire Wordpress site to a new root folder... which if you get wrong means you can't access your settings anymore to change it.
You need to better define "good" (Score:4, Interesting)
The question isn't how easy it is for a user to do something bad; the question is how easy is it for a user to inadvertently do something bad. If the application is properly designed, all tasks should not only be easy to perform, but easy to perform accurately. Presumably, this deleterious task is something that does potentially need to be done, so it should be easy to do. But it should only be easy to do if the end user actually wants to do it, and not easy to do if the intention of the end user is to do something else. Your problem as a designer is to figure out how to accurately assess the user's intent.
Re:Too good? I think not (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. At the end of the day, those who write the checks get what they want.. I was speaking more of the theory rather than the practical.
In those situations where I've recommended and warned against the functionality, and the user still demands it, I have considered it more my failure to communicate the risk than the user's failure. But, as you say, I wanted to get paid so I delivered what the user requested.
Re:I assume... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or Amazon. That no-click shopping patent is just around the corner.
Re:Users need protecting from themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
The bad ones have "Are you sure?" The awful ones have "Don't ask this again." The good ones have "Undo."
Re:Users need protecting from themselves (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, while confirmation dialogs started out this way, it's 2013 and their main purpose has evolved into cover-your-ass for the software designers. Well designed software today does not give you a popup dialog (which by now almost all users have been trained to ignore due to the massive amount of misuse), but an additional step like a checkbox you have to enter, or the need to enter, say, your account username or your passowrd to delete the account instead of just clicking a button.
Re:Too good? I think not (Score:4, Interesting)
There are several high end sports cars with "track mode" that's a more practical version of this. To put the car in this mode (with suspension and engine settings that with frankly be stupid and destructive for normal driving) requires a special key in a lock while the car is off - deliberately designed to be too awkward to switch if your waiting at a light and another sports car pulls up next to you.
Several cars also have a way to put your engine into "waiting at a light and another sports car pulls up next to you" mode that puts you into some sort of fast launch mode for the next minute or whatever, but you're only allow e.g. two per month. The Nissan GTR famously made it too easy to get launch mode, and ruined a lot of engines while still under warrantee in early models.