Don Norman is an Idiot
by Cosmo
12 December 2006
Slashdot ran a feature today chronicling something of an anti-simplicity backlash in the design world. Several important points were made, but one comment, by alleged design guru Don Norman, is absolutely bathed in idiocy:
“Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use [than Google’s].”
Yeah, I know. Blog bait if I’ve even seen it. But such specious reasoning demands a swift and solid refutation.
Central to Norman’s assertion is the assumption that every person on the Internet has never used it before, and needs individual guidance to specific topics. MSN and Yahoo! are great in this regard, he alleges, because a user can “see their choices on the home page”; Google just “hides” all the complexity, making it harder to use.
Most Internet users I know, however, eschew graphic-heavy pages entirely. For weather, rather than take the time to move the curosor over to a link that says “Weather”, they just type “Weather [zip code]” into the Google search bar. If they want stock, they search the four letter stock code. Map, they type the address. Anyone who’s seen an experienced UNIX user at work knows: keyboard beats mouse any day of the week.
Norman further praises Google’s chief competitor, Yahoo, by noting that it “even has an excellent personalization page, so you can choose what you wish to see on that first page.” Again, Norman’s lack of experience is glaring. Not only does Google have a personalization page, but unlike Yahoo’s, it is 100% user-controlled. It can contain any amount of information a given user chooses, even if that amount is nothing at all.
To me, this article raises serious doubts about its author’s web-savvy. Norman expresses a sense of disorientation and confusion that Google has separate pages for its separate services, and seems to need a graphically-oriented AOL-esq portal from which to begin every aspect of his web experience. Indeed, basic web browsing features like bookmarks, history, a search bar and RSS feeds seem to be completely unknown to him.
Most damning of all, however, Norman fails to compare his results from the “easy” MSN and Yahoo! links to those he received from Google’s “confusing” search based interface. In my experience, and in the consensus opinion of experienced Internet users, there is no faster or more effective way to find what you need than a Google (or in some cases, eBay or Wikipedia) search.
In short, Don Norman’s article misconstrues entirely the relationship between ease of use and interface complexity, and fails utterly to demonstrate how more graphically complex interfaces are superior; indeed, the only thing it does prove is that age and publication status are no measure of intelligence.
Dec 15, 09:54 AM
The difficulty in design, as I said before, is that you are simultaneously trying to please wildly differing people.
Cosmo, you pose the question that I’m constantly asking myself. The site that I’m coming up with is probably going to be pretty complicated. I’ll post a screenshot of it’s current state.
In my site, there are a shit-ton of menus available from essentially any context. The upside is that those menues are unobtrusive. You are welcomed, nay, encouraged to ignore them. But as the site becomes more familiar to you, you can explore the more powerful functionality.
And we’ve decided that drag-and-drop video podcasting is essential functionality so I am the proud new owner of a new video iPod!
About the screenshot, I should mention that 1) at least a third of the menus, portlets and options will be absent—they’re only in there from my own experimentation. 2) All of the css, icons, etc are just whatever I had lying around. 3) It would take a conscious effort for an ordinary user to make their home folder look as shitty as Admin’s does right now. 4) hopefully I’ll be able to replace those ugly little file icons with thumbnails showing the first frame of each movie.
Dec 15, 10:32 AM
I forgot to mention a surfing trick. I’m surprised that so many people still look for stuff with their eyes. On those cluttered sites, you can ctrl-f (ctrl-s if you’re cool like me), start typing what you want and it takes you there. Since you probably got there on a Google search anyway, you already know what to type.
Dec 15, 10:36 AM
Cosmo, let me start by complimenting you on a very well-written response to Don Norman’s ill-conceived article. I think you have hit the nail squarely on the head. Seven in one blow, and all that. Nice job.
Tom, I looked at your screenshot there, and I’m now going to give a very blunt critique of the design.
You have there a dreadfully overcomplicated collection of features all together in one place. It’s deeply hierarchically modal (“you are here”), and has at least three nested layers of tab structure (the main tab bar at the top, the secondary items in the blue bar under the tab, and then the nested tab bar to the right of the navigation pane). It’s far too much. Plus, it’s not at all obvious what the connexion between the contents of the “navigation” pane and the rest of the interface may be. What’s more, the most prominent tabs—the ones right at the top and furthest to the left—do not seem to be the features I would want to use most. Members? News? Events? When I’m teaching a course, the last thing in the world I care about is membership data and news from the company that makes my courseware. “News” is particularly bad, because it usually implies “changes in the software,” and mid-course corrections are a source of much fear and loathing on the part of any teacher.
To take a lesson from the time-management crowd, a user interface should make it as clear as possible, given that you have a particular task in mind, to know immediately what your “next action” should be with respect to the UI. That is the real genius of Google’s front page: You go there because you want to find something, so what is the first thing you see? Apart from the big, friendly Google logo at the top of the page, the content is dominated by a nice wide search query box, and two buttons. If you didn’t want to search the web, immediately over that are the most common alternative data sources, in a small polite typeface. If you really don’t want those, then you can click “more” to get the really comprehensive list. Its simplicity is deceptive—a lot of thought went into the contents of that page. And you’ll notice that even Google gives you the ability to sign in and get information about the company; they just do it subtly, and—what’s more important—not on the main action path for most users. The complexity is there, but the user controls when and how much (s)he gets to see.
Another (amusing) thing to note is that Google’s 276×110 pixel default logo is one of the larger site logos currently in use—compare Yahoo’s approximately 250×80, flickr’s approximately 160×60, Reuters’s 186×65, and YouTube’s 123×63. We think of their page as being “small” because of its simplicity, but they can afford to use a bigger logo (and get better brand recognition) because they do not clutter up their important pages with dross to serve the tails of their user distribution.
My point here is not to eulogize Google, but to point out why it is that simplicity is an underappreciated virtue in design—especially in web-site design. Web browsers are the hammer of modern computer UI, and every problem is their nail. It’s true that with enough CSS, DHTML, and AJAX, you can make a web browser almost behave as if it were a separate application, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. The best sites, in my not-so-humble opinion, are those that take advantage of the browser’s strengths, rather than patching around its weaknesses. To get a UI that is simple (not simplistic) and powerful (not complicated) requires insight into the work habits of the user population you intend to serve.
I said I was going to critique your design, so here it is: It’s too complicated, and currently no better than Blackboard. Back to the drawing board, my friend!
Dec 15, 12:42 PM
Thanks, Michael, we should talk more specifically about my site on another channel.
Generally speaking, I would point out that I never go to the Google homepage—it’s not every application whos relationship to the user can be summed up in a text field. Clearly a program like Autocad benefits from exposing more functionality more towards the front.
I certainly agree that primary functionality should be obvious and foremost (which is obviously not the case in the screenshot I showed you)—in the Autocad analogy, putting “Draw” someplace more obvious than “Layer”. On the other hand I would suppose you’d agree that hiding secondary functionality shouldn’t be goal in and of itself. This implies that our dissagreement, if indeed one exists, hinges on the definition of “action path”.
Dec 15, 02:59 PM
iPod? That sucks. You should have gotten a Zune.