Creating a Pleasant User Experience - Part I: Expected Behavior

Back in December, Nick Bradbury wrote a series of posts about simplicity in software. Simplicity is a big part of the user experience, but there are other things that go into making the experience pleasant. After testing some new applications and playing around with some shareware recently, I noticed a few things that really bothered me about how some of them worked. This of course lead me to think about my own applications and I learned a few things… so I’ll add onto Nick’s ideas and write a few posts about what I discovered.

Expected Behavior
Having your software behave in a way that the user would expect seems simple, but is sometimes overlooked. Expected behavior could be just anticipating what an everyday user would expect to happen when interacting with your application or it could be implementing a feature that works like similar features in other common applications.

One example that I came across was with a web application. This app used AJAX extensively to keep postbacks (sending information back to the webserver) to a minimum so that it was much more responsive to user interaction. What this application didn’t do was take into account the Back button on the browser itself.

This application had a view that showed me a high level report about some information and had links that showed me a more detailed view. When I was done with the detailed view, I clicked the back button expecting it to take me back to the overall view again. Instead it took me back to the previous site I had visited. Not what I expected! Out of habit I happened to do this same thing 3 or 4 more times before I became extremely frustrated. Not a pleasant user experience.

Another example is when you see an image on a toolbar button that is used in other applications to mean some particular action. When a user clicks that button, they expect that same function to happen. When the application does something totally different, it can be very confusing. Asking users to break their habits in order to use your software is a really tough sell. Even if you think your way is much better, ask yourself if most other people would feel the same (it’s also good to remind yourself that sometimes you’re wrong, even if you still think you’re right :-)

Examples like these can lead users to either become frustrated with your application, or find the learning curve too much and they end up ditching your app for something else.

One thing I do is to think about what my mom would expect my application to do. My mom isn’t techy at all and gets frustrated with technical stuff pretty easily. If it’s not easy to use, she won’t. Thinking like this helps me get my head out of the code and what clicking a button actually does, and makes me think of what the everyday Joe would expect it to do.

So when you’re designing and building your applications, make sure to step out of your developer shoes and into the ma and pa shoes from time to time and make sure that they can use your application easily too.