Be Willing To Be Wrong
A good lesson on using gut instinct for User Interface Design ...
"Early in our work designing Ribbon content, we had little data to go on in terms of how different content layouts within the Ribbon would affect the usability of the features being laid out. Being a new control, there wasn't any direct information we could fall back on to tell us how to use it most effectively. So, we did what we almost always do in the absence of good information: use our gut feeling to make a decision and then get the prototype into the usability lab as soon as we could to start validating the design.
This was one case in which I was pretty sure I was right. My instinct and experience told me that the chunks within a Ribbon tab should be laid out generally left-to-right in decreasing priority. (Except of course in right-to-left languages, in which we would do the opposite.) To me, this made perfect sense: people read left-to-right, we've watched people scan menus and toolbars for years left-to-right. I just knew logically this would turn out to be the right decision, so we laid out the content that way in the Ribbon and headed to the lab.
To my surprise, some of the tabs using these left-to-right layouts were performing terribly. We would put the key commands over to the left, and people just never found them, or they wouldn't find them until they scanned the rest of the tab first. In short, my gut instinct and my intelligent guess were both as wrong as they could have been." continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)
"Early in our work designing Ribbon content, we had little data to go on in terms of how different content layouts within the Ribbon would affect the usability of the features being laid out. Being a new control, there wasn't any direct information we could fall back on to tell us how to use it most effectively. So, we did what we almost always do in the absence of good information: use our gut feeling to make a decision and then get the prototype into the usability lab as soon as we could to start validating the design.
This was one case in which I was pretty sure I was right. My instinct and experience told me that the chunks within a Ribbon tab should be laid out generally left-to-right in decreasing priority. (Except of course in right-to-left languages, in which we would do the opposite.) To me, this made perfect sense: people read left-to-right, we've watched people scan menus and toolbars for years left-to-right. I just knew logically this would turn out to be the right decision, so we laid out the content that way in the Ribbon and headed to the lab.
To my surprise, some of the tabs using these left-to-right layouts were performing terribly. We would put the key commands over to the left, and people just never found them, or they wouldn't find them until they scanned the rest of the tab first. In short, my gut instinct and my intelligent guess were both as wrong as they could have been." continued ... (Via Jensen Harris)
Excel Ribbon.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home