More on Magic Ink: Or, Has 20 Years of the GUI Ruined Us?

As I mentioned in my last post on Bret Victor's excellent paper, Magic Ink, there was so much food for thought for software and UI developers in his article that I took the rare step of making my staff read the article and discuss it in a group setting. One point which arose during that discussion bears further elaboration here.

Victor spends a good bit of time talking about developer/machine representations of a data model versus how real, actual human beings are able to represent data, and, more specifically to my point, choices. In particular, he takes to task the standard "Preferences" (or, in Microsoft parlance) "Options" screen found in pretty much every desktop application. What we are frequently presented with is something like this:

But this is a machine's (or, better yet, a developer's) representation of a series of choices. It's all binary and fairly decontextualized. Now, the trend in UI design to categorize preferences or choices into a larger context such as "Security" or "Bookmarks" is helpful, but a lot of these preferences are still represented in the machine model, not the cognitive model the user has. Victor points us to a better way:

For presenting abstract, non-comparative information such as this, an excellent graphical element is simply a concise sentence.

Victor's BART schedule widget, which he uses as a case study for many of the ideas in the article, uses just this approach when setting user preferences. For example, here is a preference setting which lets a user decide if they want to announce upcoming trains, and when those announcements should go off:

This is very succinct and tells the user, in plain English, what's going to happen.

But would this pass the Mom test? (AKA "Could your less-than-technology-savvy mother figure it out without any help?")

I'm not sure.

Look at the example. What are the visual indicators that you can actually interact with this? How do I know that I can change the text in this sentence?

Granted, most users, when presented with a new piece of software or a Web application that they can't immediately figure out, just start clicking until something happens. Someone clicking that preference sentence would see, in short order, that you can change quite a few things, as evidenced in additional shots from the BART widget:

But the question, for me, remains: would a user be able to figure this out? Would they get stymied by this and not really know what to do next and instead click on things elsewhere that they had already figured out. I'm inclined to believe that is exactly what most users would do.

Users have become so inured to the checkbox/radio button preferences dialog box that I'm not sure they'd intuit how to manipulate preferences in any other way. Users have been working with that kind of preferences model for over 20 years, and I don't know that it's a "design pattern" that can be broken without a heck of a lot of effort. (Then again, clicking around on the screen until something happens isn't a lot of effort.) What I suspect would happen is that a user would see this and then say "Well what do I do now?" and call the help desk (or a tech-savvy family member or friend). Users who feel they don't have the time to figure things out (and who does?) often just stop their task when the path to accomplishment isn't immediately available. Worse yet, if they've been burned in the past by randomly clicking around on the screen (resulting in an application or system crash), they won't be able to move forward with manipulating the application for fear of wrecking everything.

I know that Victor's article is forward-thinking, and it's great that it is, but in considering how users interact with interfaces right now and the years of "standard" experience that they have, the preference as a sentence to manipulate concept is slightly problematic.

Perhaps stronger default visual indicators, like hyperlink-style underlines under items than can be changed, would alleviate this problem and quickly teach users that those items were changeable. It's a nitpicky point, but important, because without those extra visual indicators, a heck of a lot of people would be calling the help desk.