Wayfinding and Mice: Ease vs. Mastery

During the Wayfinding project, my mind has drifted to the purposely complicated.

I live on a street with a large stretch of torn up brick road.  It's not in a defined neighborhood, but the houses lined up and down this stretch are some of the nicer homes in the area.  The brick road is vicious.  I avoid it on my bike as well as car.  Why would the residents not demand real pavement?  Smooth easy pavement.

Simple, because I, like most everyone else, avoid that route.  In central Lawrence, the residential areas are on a grid, so unlike modern neighborhoods with only a few entrances, any street can be used to get anywhere.  I think you probably see where this is going.  I wouldn't want to live on a street that works as a thoroughfare for regular traffic.  Solution: make it miserable.

It seems a bit anti-design at first.  However, a design solution responds to the need, and if the need is a decrease in demand, then inconvenience is a powerful tool.  Not all design creates ease, in this case, property value may increase because of the low traffic.  It's a bit like economics.  Not everyone can drive to work in London, it's just not logistically possible.  Decrease demand by charging a fortune to legally park, and simultaneously allow for alternative options (public transport).  These are design solutions aimed at frustration and inconvenience.  It's a cobbled road.  And it's a solution.

So are there benefits to the status-quo in our current campus wayfinding, you bet.  One problem we saw presented this week was locating a quiet and private study area.  The group found probably one of the best study locations I've ever seen on campus, and yes, it is really hard to find.  Their solution is to provide better signage to designate areas like this.  The solution creates a problem though, as guiding more people to the quiet private spot changes the attributes of the location to begin with.  It will no longer be a private location, and though it might be quiet, it will only be free on Saturday nights if you're lucky.

This all brings me to the larger question of designing for ease versus mastery.  Let's look at the mouse for example.  Here is an apple mouse.

You think Apple will ever go beige again?

Well, they look a lot better now don't they?  Yet, they haven't added any more buttons since.  There is something that smacks of ease here.  Only one option?  You don't even need to look at the thing after you touch it the first time.  What about this mouse?

Holy Sh..

So, check this thing out.  This one is bit more complicated, in fact, it's nearly impossible to know anything that this mouse does by looking at it.  Very low functional legibility.  My only guess is the dark purple buttons are the normal left and right click (dig the SNES color scheme though).  Also scroll wheels are ubiquitous now too thanks to the interwebs typical layout.

So which is a better mouse?

Neither!  They are completely different needs, and completely different products. 

Some of you may remember life before the mouse.  I don't actually, but I have had experience using UNIX and DOS interface inventory control systems.  These were super stable programs designed in the late 80's that often stuck throughout industry because of the rock-solid reliability.  In fact, a lot of companies ended up switching to new programs only because XP wasn't DOS based.  Anyway, these programs were by and large non-graphic user interfaces, which means, keystroke navigation.  Keystroke navigation is not something that comes naturally, but with mastery, absolutely destroys mouse navigation for reference, data-entry, and eventual ease of use.  You don't have to take your hands off the keyboard, those F buttons actually did things, and with a swift tap, you could move from one screen to another.  Again, like I was saying last time, these 10 digits attached to our arms represent the pinnacle of data entry ability.  I mean, I think the bugle is a nice instrument, but the saxophone, it finds itself in more places, doing more things, to be sure.  You see the correlation?

This OpenOffice open-source mouse is of the same nature.  Many people have no choice but to use the mouse, perhaps for drawing, manipulation of 3D environments, or selecting one thing from a hundred others like a paint swatch, but people shouldn't have to use a multi-foldered pull down menu just to click on a command that they should be able to do from memory, or as soon as they think about it.  This mouse, in other words, in conjunction with a complicated program, could increase productivity to an amazing degree.  It would take hours and hours of working with it, you would have to program it yourself, each button, which may also take a lot of time and thought.  The end result though, is further speeding up the interaction between user and machine.  If you have ever seen anyone use an ADOBE product, that uses it every day, and customized their keyboard shortcuts, you wouldn't believe how fast someone can photoshop/video edit/illustrate.  No one else is going to be able to sit down and use his computer quite as effectively.  In fact, the sight of that mouse might keep people from even trying to use his work-station.  I would count that as a benefit as well.  It reminds me of a T-shirt from Penny Arcade.

Playing Guitar Hero requires mastery of 5 buttons, Photoshop requires mastery of as many as keystroke shortcuts as you can remember.  Hence the joke, and hence the speed at which the masterful can interact with the digital environment.

Sometimes we design for the computer in the library (ANY end user).  Sometimes we design for one individual, doing one task as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Both are effective solutions to real needs.

Sometimes requiring mastery benefits us, more often it does not, but one can't strip everything down to one button.  Flip Video makes a good argument for it though, but the professional will still need the canon GL-2.

GeorgeP