January 2007

Friendly Error Message From Overstock.com

Say what you want about the paranoid CEO of Overstock.com. He’s evidently built a culture that encourages communicating with customers in an amusing and entertaining way.

I liked seeing this message when I received it (while trying to buy yet another tech toy). It made me feel actively good toward Overstock.

Some people may see this and feel that it’s too flippant. But those people need to loosen up a smidge.

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I just read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column from December 18th (“Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers”).

His main point:

User interfaces in film are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems.

I agree with this assertion. I also like his descriptions of the typical problems with cinematic depictions of user interfaces. (He refers to them as bloopers; god am I sooo tired of that word…)

But he’s way off base in his conclusions. At the end of the piece he says the following:

In the film context, unrealistic usability is only to be expected. Still, I see two real problems with it:

Research funding and management expectations are subtly biased by the incessant emphasis on unrealistic UI design such as voice, 3D, avatars, and AI. When you see something work as part of a coherent and exciting story, you start wanting it. You even start believing in it. After all, we’ve seen 3D and voice so often that we’ve developed an implicit belief in their usefulness.

Users blame themselves when they can’t use technology. This phenomenon is bad enough already; it’s made worse by the prevalence of scenes in which people walk up to random computers and start using them immediately. We need people to start demanding easier design and blaming the technology when it’s too hard to use. Movies make this change in attitudes more difficult.

I actually don’t disagree with his claim that fictional depictions of user interfaces bias funding and management expectations. But I disagree with his implicit assertion that this is bad. Technological progress is intimately entwined with depictions of future technologies in books, magazines, movies, and other media. Many of the technologies we are familiar with today were first conceived by an imaginative science fiction writer.

To say that depictions of not-yet-existing user interfaces to technology leads to unreasonable (or useless, as Nielsen would have it) desires ignores the positive relationship between today’s fiction and tomorrow’s reality. It also short shrifts the idea that innovation happens in fits and starts, often with many blind alleys and unfruitful developments.

Do we really want to live in Nielsen’s utilitarian utopia where no UI is created without strict adherence to today’s principles of usability? I understand the design world’s issues with Nielsen when I read pieces like this.

Regarding the second conclusion (“Users blame themselves when they can’t use technology”): does he *really* think that unrealistic depictions of usage has any real effect on peoples’ strong tendency to blame themselves for poorly designed UI’s? I highly doubt that cinematic depictions “make it worse.” That’s just a red herring. When it comes to using technology, every practitioner knows that people come to the interaction with a strong predisposition to attribute their own performance to internal factors. Do movies somehow make this bias toward self-attribution any stronger? Doubtful.

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