That’s very interesting to hear from someone “in the business.” Seems quite a change from the expectation back to my childhood in the 60s of, “READ MANUAL/INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE USE!”
I’m curious as to what contributed to this change. Has it been shown that people learn better this way, was it simply to save manufacturer’s costs, or did other factors contribute?
Seemed like at some point maybe 10-20 years back, there was talk of improving the quality of documentation - the old trope of Asian language translations, or Ikea instructions. Seems odd if the reaction was - instead - to simply do away with documentation.
I almost always prefer printed manuals, with the lone exception when there’s some kind of hard to explain or illustrate step, or some sort of audio/video component that can’t really be explained via text. In those cases, the videos are terrific.
And don’t get me started on all the idiotic youtube videos that take 3 minutes to explain something in a paragraph that I could read in 15 seconds, and without any particular information that really calls for video and audio. This is a plague upon us, whether it’s for search results for Google queries or instructional videos.
This is something my wife and I comment on frequently.
We are both lawyers in our late 50s, so we have A LOT of experience/ability locating the important info from written materials. So I acknowledge a part of our preference may be related to our age/experience. But we find it far easier to locate information in printed documents, than on-line.
And information we obtained from written sources seems to stick with us more than electronic. Purely anecdotal, but I wonder what research shows?
But hell - I still have a daily paper delivered to my home, subscribe to paper magazines, and regularly take books out from the library! :rolleyes:
But “online” and “printed” are about the physical support more than the format, and “videos” and “written” can both be on or offline.
When the Spanish government announced its intent to move its Official Bulletin to being PDF only, the country was surprised to hear “HALLELUJAH AMEN!” from the Bar. Lawyers explained that the only reason any of them was getting it on paper any more was that people expected to see the piles and piles of paper; searching PDFs is so much easier than searching through piles of paper that even the oldest ones were already using PDF in preference to the printed version.
I personally don’t draw a distinction between a PDF and a literal printed document- the only difference is hitting “Print”.
But as far as a 2 minute instructional video vs. a handful of sentences and a diagram that describes the same thing? I far prefer the sentences and diagram, unless there’s some gotcha element that requires someone show how to actually achieve it- like in assembly instructions that are hard to describe, for example. Or cooking videos- I never could get brown butter right until I watched a video of it actually being done. But if I’m just cooking a recipe? A video is a total PITA in that case- I’d much rather have a normal printed recipe.
I hate instructional videos with a passion, unless they’re showing how to do a physical task.
I’d much rather skim a page in a manual (PDF or printed, doesn’t matter) to see if it talks about the topic in the first instance, and secondly to quickly learn about the topic. I don’t want to sit through 5 minutes of video just to find that it doesn’t answer my question.
It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but the reason you design for people not reading the manual is that… people generally don’t read the manual until they have a problem. And a lot of people don’t even read it then for a number of reasons (lost it, can’t read the language, easier to find the solution some other way).
That doesn’t mean you don’t write a manual! There is a subset of the population who learns best that way. But if a majority of your users can’t figure out how to use the feature they want to use without reading, they’re either not going to use it (in which case why did you spend all that time and effort adding it) or they’re going to do it wrong and be unhappy.
One thing that contributed to this in software is that software interfaces can be both much richer and much more complete than physical interfaces.
For example, on my car, when the tire pressure monitors on my car need to be reset, I have to turn it on (but have the engine off), put it in neutral, push the brake in, then hold a button under the dash for 3 seconds until the sensor light starts blinking. I almost certainly got some part of that sequence wrong and I have to look at the manual every time. It’s a horrible design.
However, I’ve never had to look at the manual to pair my phone with it. Because it has a touchscreen with buttons that take you through a menu hierarchy, and I know how to navigate one of those. I press the button labeled “Audio”, then “Bluetooth” then “Add a Device”, then follow the instructions on the screen. I’m probably doing almost as much reading as if I had to pull out a book, but the important thing is that it only shows me the information I need at the time.
A lot of this is relying on some heavy common cultural knowledge, but it’s mostly not relying on particularly modern or recent knowledge. If you took someone from, say, the 1950s, put them in my car and handed them a phone and said: “this is a phone. There’s a way to connect it over a radio to the car so you can play music on the car’s stereo. Use this screen to set it up” after they got over the FutureShock, most people could do that! Because the things on the screen look like buttons, so they’ll try pressing them. And that’s pretty much all you need.
Obviously, we in the business fall short of this ideal often, but it is possible to meet. And it’s generally a failure of design when we don’t.
Thanks for the very thoughtful response. A couple of impressions
I realize a good part of my mindset reflects bias, which I ought to try harder to overcome. But what you consider a “richer” interface, I consider "unnecessarily complicated. Here’s an analogy - I’ve never encountered a multitool that did a better job at any task than the dedicated tool. Of course, the multitool can come in handy in a pinch - tossed into the glovebox of backpack.
So much tech strikes me as multitools. (Not a great analogy, I admit, because much tech can do tasks for which there is no dedicated option.) I want my phone to make and receive calls and texts. And I don’t want a million different was to do those. Tell me how it is done, and I’ll learn. Drives me nuts when a techie will say, “OR, you can do it like this, or like this…” I don’t need to express my individuality or obtain fulfillment by how I dial a phone or set my margins.
Of course, the problem is when I realize I would like to do ONE MORE THING in addition to calls and texts. The problem is that the developer doesn’t know which of the zillions of other things I personally want to do. So I’m down the rabbit hole.
Also, your hypothetical 50s person finds tech more intuitive than me. And while that hepcat might be intrigued by the “trial by error” method of figuring things out, I find it frustrating. “Just show me the fucking button to push, dammit!” Then, even if I succeed in finding how to do something "like resetting my car’s clock 2x/yr, 6 months later I forget the steps I went thru last time, making it all the more frustrating.
I probably should spend more time messing with tech, or taking classes. But that is simply nothing I find enjoyable. I’d rather play music, read a book …
I don’t know what kind of phone you own but there are phones designed specifically around this. Usually marketed to senior citizens.
But, if you bought a 5.5" pocket computer instead, then it’s going to do a million pocket computer things because that’s exactly what it was designed to do.
Yeah. I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I DO like to occasionally take a picture. And on occasion I have googled something from my phone. I seems like the gap between “calls and texts” and “EVERYTHING” is vast. With much of tech, I find myself shutting off and hiding the countless features I DON’T want, as they are noise, interfering with my limited use.
I think the issue is that when you get right down to it, it’s NOT “a phone”.
Modern day smartphones are generalist tools by design; the device itself is essentially a small touchscreen computer with the following hardware (typically) added:
[ul]
[li]Telecom network connectivity (i.e. 3G/4G type networks)[/li][li]Wireless Ethernet connectivity[/li][li]GPS positioning capability[/li][li]Camera functionality, both still and video (once you have one, the other is trivial)[/li][li]Other sensors - barometer, accelerometers, thermometers, etc…[/li][/ul]
Everything else is software. So you can do what I did and take the sim card out of an old phone and turn it into a little tablet. Or you can install apps to read bar codes, recognize songs, measure your GPS accuracy, read books out loud, play music, remind you to take your medication, evaluate your sleep, track airline flights, identify stars in the sky, play games, predict the weather, etc… Pretty much anything you can think of that you could do with a computer, and any combination of those other hardware capabilities.
And the thing that’s most interesting is that when you deal with something with multiple ways that something can be done, you’d be surprised how often people will choose to do it those ways. I mean, I’ve designed business processes and the associated user interfaces to do business functions, and done my damnedest to make it streamlined, intuitive and easy. Despite that, there’s always a set of people who will forget or ignore the training and come up with a fucked up way of solving the problem that takes more effort and is less useful than the intended way. Why? I don’t know- maybe they think fundamentally differently than I do.
But either way, designers of commercial smartphone apps have to account for that, and make multiple paths functional, or people will bitch because the standard way is “unintuitive” or “illogical”, even if it’s because their intuition is to always start with the leftmost icon in every situation, or they always start with the green icon, or other equally idiotic intuitive approaches.
This is a good critique, and there are many many bad “multitool” tech interfaces.
But what I meant by richer is not just shoving more crap into the interface.
It means things like intuitive controls. Highlighting that gives you clues about which interface elements are relevant. Built-in help and tutorials.
The paradox of choice is real. It’s nice to have multiple ways to accomplish a task because different methods are appropriate for different users and different circumstances, but it is a pain to have to learn so many different things when you just want one way.
This is partly a communication failure on the techie’s part. We techies are often excessively enamored of the flexibility modern tech provides and are bad at distilling
I don’t mean to say that the 50s person would have a super-easy task. But if they were willing to experiment, they’d figure it out. They can push buttons, they will eventually figure out that they are navigating a hierarchical interface and be able to explore it. They won’t necessarily figure it out quickly or easily, but given enough patience, they will figure it out.
I mentioned that to contrast it to the tire pressure sensor warning. No human is ever going to figure that sequence out without reading the manual. The only vaguely discoverable part of it is that the button you press (which is hidden under the dashboard) has the same symbol as the indicator light. Everything else is just arbitrary magic.
The manual for one piece of software that I use daily and occasionally write pieces of is 938 pages (that was the closest book to me to check). There are probably a dozen others. They are useful references to refer to, but they are not designed to be read cover to cover.
You learn to use it by watching, doing, experimenting, and occasionally looking up parts that you didn’t figure out.
Think about a smartphone. How long would a manual have to be to explain how it works and how to use it? How many words do you have to use to describe, say, a swipe in a way that’s clear enough that someone would understand it without seeing it? If a picture is worth 1000 words, ten minutes watching an experienced user is worth 1000 pages.
I generally manage with the hardware but I went from Android to Samsung back to Android with my last three phones and while not Apple vs. PC, they’re enough different to throw me off. One failure was a couple months was when I needed to send an SMS to three people, not in the same group. A friend with a Android was nearby and he said he didn’t knw either, then went to Google.
“Tap Messages”
“Check”
“Tap the three dots for the menu”
“Check”
“Tap Settings”
… “No Settings” showing him the menu.And that was that. After spending another five minutes fussing around, I C&Pd the message three times in about a minute.
Generally whenever I hear “intuitive controls” I expect I’m going to have a terrible time figuring them out.
The problem is that what people think of as “intuitive” seems to all too often come down to being whatever they’re used to and/or whatever they personally thought made sense; and people designing “intuitive controls” all too often don’t seem to realize that other people are used to other things, and that what makes immediate sense to one person is all too often nonsense to somebody else.
I just spent way too much of today figuring out how to transfer a photo from that new phone to my desktop computer.
First I carefully followed all the instructions given in manual and on the phone for transferring using Bluetooth. I got Bluetooth functional on both devices; the phone apparently found the computer, because it suggested the computer as a recipient for the message – but all I could get from repeated tries was “message not sent”. No explanation of why it wasn’t sent. Not on the phone, not in the manual, not at least obviously in an online search.
Eventually I gave up and hooked computer and phone together via USB. It turned out that this wouldn’t work with a Mac until I downloaded software, but at least a moderate amount of searching found me that info and got me the software. The phone wouldn’t connect. It told me I needed to set it to MTP but there was no information on either phone or manual telling me what MTP was or on where I was supposed to change that setting. Turned out I needed to go on the phone first into settings, then into phone settings, then to usb mode and there indeed, four layers down, was MTP as an option.
So then I had to re-open the transfer software, although I’d already had it open; and then, finally, there was a window on the computer showing me what was on the phone, yay! all I need to do is to drag over to copy – wait a minute, there’s nothing in Pictures. But I know there’s a picture in that phone. The picture’s reachable in Gallery on the phone, but Gallery’s not in the window; just Pictures. Which, again, has nothing in it.
Turns out that what is in the window, though not inside Pictures, is DCIM and inside there is 100KYCRA and inside 100KYCRA is the picture; which copies to the computer just fine, now that I’ve found it. But what on earth is intuitive about that? And why was it not explained in the manual?
Yes, I got there by punching assorted buttons, mostly. But it took me about twenty times as long as it should have.
Back in the Jurassic Era, computer hardware and software came with thorough and well-written user manuals. The manuals even had — I’m afraid young’uns will need to Google this obsolete word — Tables of Contents. I read these manuals with some care and, at risk of appearing immodest, was able to awe my peers with my knowledge. I read, just for fun, the Theory of Maintenance of an IBM mainframe cover-to-cover … and later was thereby able to invent a hardware shortcut that saved much cost.
That the world had moved on from User Manuals was brought home in the mid 1980’s when a fellow computer scientist held down the Option key while clicking Compile on a Macintosh and proudly announced that this would turn on the compiler’s optimizer. My impression is that information like this wasn’t given in a manual, but was disseminated via pop-up Hints. Or, like Easter Eggs, a reward for those daring enough to experiment with random clicks and keys.
So Google it is nowadays. Ask about a “manual” on a techie message board and the response will be “Old man: Don’t you know how to Google?”
It’s certainly overused as a buzzword (obviously you don’t want to advertise something as having “unintuitive” controls, but they do exist. Did anyone claim that the ridiculous process you have to go through was intuitive? I’m here to agree with you that they are wrong.
Also, note that there’s a distinction between “intuitive” and “discoverable”.
Intuitive interfaces are ones that are easily understandable. Discoverable interfaces are ones that you won’t have to learn about except by using the device.
A touchscreen button that looks like a button and depresses when you touch it is intuitive and discoverable. You just have to look at it to know how it works, and it works just the way you’d expect. You push it.
Pinch to zoom is intuitive, but not particularly discoverable. You kind of have to see it or chance on it by using two fingers, which people weren’t used to doing with touch devices. But once you see it, you pretty much understand it immediately and will probably be annoyed at anything that supports both touch and zooming and doesn’t use it.
There are many many discoverable but unintuitive interfaces. Basically, anything that has a prominent button or slider that doesn’t work in an obvious manner. One example might be the cruise control systems on many cars. The buttons are right there on the steering wheel, but how you use them, and how the system reacts is very non-obvious.
Usually the way to go about that is to copy to the cloud from the phone (Google Drive, ICloud, Dropbox, etc…) and then download it on the desktop.
Or just email/text it to your email address and download it from there.
Fiddling with cables and networking is a pain; the only exception I can think of is that wi-fi direct stuff that our (wife and I) phones can do- that’s super-simple and quick, but it doesn’t work with a PC.