Where are my pictures ?!
A little observation from life on the topic of intuitive interfaces.
My wife is a pharmacist. Life baggage - two education (including higher education) and the husband-programmer. The second suggests that from illiterate advice in relation to computers, it is generally insured. And most importantly - there is always the opportunity to ask and get a comprehensive answer if something is not clear. But the trick is that “incomprehensible” is not a sign of bad (at least not always). This is absolutely normal. The incomprehensible just has to be supported by the opportunity to get an explanation. If we talk about ordinary desktop applications, a hint or quick access to the relevant section of the manual is quite normal ways to provide such an opportunity. A programmer husband is only one of these methods, and a relatively universal one :)
')
So far, without facts, because what was said above was a small lyrical introduction. I wanted to talk about another stumbling block.
Evil is lurking ... Point. Evil - hiding! When all actions are clear to the user because of their obviousness, and the result does not match what was expected, this most likely means that the content of the actions performed (the essence of the implementation) does not meet the user's expectations, formed by your own presentation (ie, interface). Why does this happen at all? First I will describe a fresh example from the life:
In professional activities, my wife uses a computer for two main purposes (I do not take into account now specialized industry software, but on purpose I speak exclusively about commonly used ones):
On the first point, everything seems to be in order. Since she perfectly understands the essence of her actions, and is not trained like an other office monkey to press buttons with hard-fixed images in her memory, she can freely use different email clients. Trifle? Maybe. But do not give up - read on and I hope that I will be able to convey to you the degree of its importance.
As for the second point, the circumstances are such that she deals with the search for the necessary articles at home (that is, where there is access to the Internet), and she reads - mostly at work (“in Russian” speaking - offline). With the search for the information she needs, she seems to be doing quite well. But an article was found that tomorrow will definitely be needed when the client comes to find out why X and Y have different indications for use with the same composition of active substances. What should be done with the article from her point of view? Save it. And it is difficult to blame the user for the illogicality of her actions. And then she rewrites the saved pages on the USB flash drive, brings them to the pharmacy, opens ... Where are the pictures? Where are the pictures? What the g *** but this is his Linux, he saved me a page without pictures! (Yes, my Linux is the classic culprit of all problems :)
It is easy to guess that she copied only the file with html-content to the USB flash drive, completely unaware that we also need a certain directory in which the images are stored separately. And again it can not be blamed for wrong actions. Answer the question - what did she save? The answer is a page. Not a file, not a HTML code. A page with all its contents. Those. exactly one (!) essence. So where did the need to rewrite any additional directories come from? Is this logical, intuitive? In my opinion - this is just complete nonsense. From the user hid what he does not need to know. Commendable aspiration. But poor implementation actually led to deception (!) Of the user. He was misled and did so silently, without giving the slightest opportunity to avoid undesirable consequences.
Let's go back to the email. Why does she have no problems with using different tools here? Because when working with each of them, it always remains in the field of applied concepts, such as a letter, addressee, folder, etc. Without going beyond the application area in this case, it has the full right not to suspect the existence of files or directories in the file system.
In the case of a saved page, as a user, she was forced to move from the concepts of the application area (such as a website, a page, or a search engine query) to the level of files and directories. And she failed to cope with him, not only and not so much because she was less familiar with this level. And to the greatest extent because the system presented (browser + OS), the logic of this transition (perceived as a one-to-one correspondence “page-> file”) turned out to be completely different.
Thank God that at least someone has ever done at least something to correct this nonsense. And this attempt was called MHTML. But the result is not actually achieved. For compatibility is lame in both legs.
About firefox - see the relevant section of the link: MHTML in Firefox .
Opera does have a corresponding option when saving. But even if the opera has the ability to save to the mhtml format, the list of save options is as follows:
- HTML file
- HTML file with images
- Web Archive (single file)
- Text file
Also, in general, far from the limit of perfection. Although it is much closer to the category of "incomprehensible." But there is still something to work on.
The findings of the above suggests several.
Criticize, say, easy ... But I want this small note to warn you, dear colleagues, from similar design solutions.
My wife is a pharmacist. Life baggage - two education (including higher education) and the husband-programmer. The second suggests that from illiterate advice in relation to computers, it is generally insured. And most importantly - there is always the opportunity to ask and get a comprehensive answer if something is not clear. But the trick is that “incomprehensible” is not a sign of bad (at least not always). This is absolutely normal. The incomprehensible just has to be supported by the opportunity to get an explanation. If we talk about ordinary desktop applications, a hint or quick access to the relevant section of the manual is quite normal ways to provide such an opportunity. A programmer husband is only one of these methods, and a relatively universal one :)
')
So far, without facts, because what was said above was a small lyrical introduction. I wanted to talk about another stumbling block.
Evil is lurking ... Point. Evil - hiding! When all actions are clear to the user because of their obviousness, and the result does not match what was expected, this most likely means that the content of the actions performed (the essence of the implementation) does not meet the user's expectations, formed by your own presentation (ie, interface). Why does this happen at all? First I will describe a fresh example from the life:
In professional activities, my wife uses a computer for two main purposes (I do not take into account now specialized industry software, but on purpose I speak exclusively about commonly used ones):
- work with e-mail correspondence (e-mail)
- searching and reading information on the Internet
On the first point, everything seems to be in order. Since she perfectly understands the essence of her actions, and is not trained like an other office monkey to press buttons with hard-fixed images in her memory, she can freely use different email clients. Trifle? Maybe. But do not give up - read on and I hope that I will be able to convey to you the degree of its importance.
As for the second point, the circumstances are such that she deals with the search for the necessary articles at home (that is, where there is access to the Internet), and she reads - mostly at work (“in Russian” speaking - offline). With the search for the information she needs, she seems to be doing quite well. But an article was found that tomorrow will definitely be needed when the client comes to find out why X and Y have different indications for use with the same composition of active substances. What should be done with the article from her point of view? Save it. And it is difficult to blame the user for the illogicality of her actions. And then she rewrites the saved pages on the USB flash drive, brings them to the pharmacy, opens ... Where are the pictures? Where are the pictures? What the g *** but this is his Linux, he saved me a page without pictures! (Yes, my Linux is the classic culprit of all problems :)
It is easy to guess that she copied only the file with html-content to the USB flash drive, completely unaware that we also need a certain directory in which the images are stored separately. And again it can not be blamed for wrong actions. Answer the question - what did she save? The answer is a page. Not a file, not a HTML code. A page with all its contents. Those. exactly one (!) essence. So where did the need to rewrite any additional directories come from? Is this logical, intuitive? In my opinion - this is just complete nonsense. From the user hid what he does not need to know. Commendable aspiration. But poor implementation actually led to deception (!) Of the user. He was misled and did so silently, without giving the slightest opportunity to avoid undesirable consequences.
Let's go back to the email. Why does she have no problems with using different tools here? Because when working with each of them, it always remains in the field of applied concepts, such as a letter, addressee, folder, etc. Without going beyond the application area in this case, it has the full right not to suspect the existence of files or directories in the file system.
In the case of a saved page, as a user, she was forced to move from the concepts of the application area (such as a website, a page, or a search engine query) to the level of files and directories. And she failed to cope with him, not only and not so much because she was less familiar with this level. And to the greatest extent because the system presented (browser + OS), the logic of this transition (perceived as a one-to-one correspondence “page-> file”) turned out to be completely different.
Thank God that at least someone has ever done at least something to correct this nonsense. And this attempt was called MHTML. But the result is not actually achieved. For compatibility is lame in both legs.
About firefox - see the relevant section of the link: MHTML in Firefox .
Opera does have a corresponding option when saving. But even if the opera has the ability to save to the mhtml format, the list of save options is as follows:
- HTML file
- HTML file with images
- Web Archive (single file)
- Text file
Also, in general, far from the limit of perfection. Although it is much closer to the category of "incomprehensible." But there is still something to work on.
The findings of the above suggests several.
- One of the key indicators of the quality of a software system from the point of view of Usability is the clarity with which its interface complies with the boundaries of its application area. A good example that clearly contrasts with the described example with the preservation of pages is the ScrapBook extension for Mozilla Firefox browser. Another, already voiced, example - MUAs (Mail User Agents).
- If the system contains in one form or another a transition from its application area to some other information model (for example, a file system model) or vice versa, this transition should be thought out by the architect and designer with extreme care.
Criticize, say, easy ... But I want this small note to warn you, dear colleagues, from similar design solutions.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/50338/
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