Whipping Users into Shape
By Michael Swaine
If we didn't drum user experience into your head sufficiently last month, hear me now, or hear me later: The Web is—or should be—a new beginning. A tabula rasa. So why smear this freshly gessoed, stretched, and easeled canvas with the same old daubs?
Too often, we Web site designers make the error of blindly copying the flawed motifs of operating system and application software developers when defining the user experience for our sites. "At's-a no good," as Dale Dougherty might say if he ever got over his warped anti-Marx Brothers bias (see my March 2000 column). Operating systems and application programs have mollycoddled users for far too long with namby-pamby, lowest-common-denominator user interfaces. It's time to insist that users hold up their end of the computer-user interface. It's time for a little tough love.
The newest, coolest user interface is Apple's aqua, judging by the imitations of its translucent gumdrop buttons that have been appearing all over the Web. I object. I think this is wrong. Gumdrops are for couch potatoes, and you know where that combination leads—to sticky couch cushions. But I may be letting my metaphor get away from me. The point is, gumdrop people aren't our kind of people. Gumdrop people still think that Al Gore won the U.S. Presidential election.
Let's face facts (something gumdrop people don't like to do): Using the Web is work. And by work I don't mean surfing, browsing, or small talk, but typing, searching, making informed decisions, and—many of us hope—spending money.
