Forcing Choices on Users
February 22nd, 2007
We have to be careful when we define users’ choices, as it is possible they’ll stumble when none of the available choices fit their situation.
I recently stumbled across this oldie-but-goodie post by Jon Udell:
Here’s what stopped me from writing an endorsement for somebody on LinkedIn today: the requirement to define our relationship as one of these choices:
The sum of my relationship with “R.” is: 1) he wrote some cool software that I tried and wrote about, and 2) we had an exchange, more recently, in the comments area of a website. And guess what? When I google for “R.’s” last name and mine, the first two hits correspond exactly to those two points. If there were a freeform input box, I’d have simply entered the query.
Along the same lines, Chris Whelan, in his brilliant presentation at the UIE Web App Summit with Greg Almquist, showed this picture to the audience and stopped his presentation until someone told him who it was:
Nobody in the audience could answer his question, yet Chris persisted: “I’m just going to sit here until you tell me.” It was truly an unnerving moment.
After a minute or so, Chris stood up and announced, “That’s exactly what we do to our users. We ask them a question they have no way of answering and we don’t let them continue until they supply an answer.” Chris then went on to talk about H&R Block’s approaches to dealing with this issue, which happens frequently in tax preparation software.
Brilliant way to show a constant design problem.
[By the way, the guy in the picture is James Polk, the eleventh president of the United States and famous for, well, nothing of lasting interest. Sadly, according to Wikipedia, "Scholars have ranked him 10th to 12th on the list of greatest presidents for his ability to set an agenda and achieve all of it." Not saying much for the 32 presidents that ranked lower. You knew all that, right?]
