

Creativity Over Optimization - cwilson
http://blog.asmartbear.com/creativity-over-optimization.html

======
Qz
_"Boogers were already semi-standardized. User interfaces should follow the
principle of "least surprise" — if people are used to a certain metaphor,
icon, or behavior, you should honor that so people understand your product
immediately. No one else had a mini-viewer."_

It's amazing how many people misinterpret and/or completely make up their own
definitions for the principle of least surprise.

 _"6. The mini-viewer doesn't convey more information than boogers do."_

This is wrong, and seems to be the key point of what the 'mini-viewer' has
over 'boogers' -- the miniviewer shows the shape of the text where the text
has been changed. If you're familiar with the text, you have a decent chance
of being able to look at the shape of the text in the mini-viewer and possibly
know what that text says, vaguely if not precisely. The boogers just show the
vertical position of the changes in the document. Thus, the mini-viewer _does_
convey more information than the boogers.

The fact that it is a miniature representation of the document is also a plus
-- the boogers are an abstraction where as the mini-viewer is a
representation.

The main thing I get is that this guy is thinking about UI optimization in
terms of how can the UI be optimized for the guy implementing it, rather than
how the UI can be optimized for the person using it, which is exactly the
wrong way to think about optimization.

~~~
derefr
> The main thing I get is that this guy is thinking about UI optimization in
> terms of how can the UI be optimized for the guy implementing it, rather
> than how the UI can be optimized for the person using it, which is exactly
> the wrong way to think about optimization.

I read the article as more of "this is the problem with interpreting 'do
incremental development' as 'be a genetic algorithm.'" If you told a computer
to come up with things that make the UX _slightly_ better, it would come up
with boogers before it came up with the miniviewer, because boogers are a
local minimum, whereas the miniviewer requires "climbing the hill" of
development-without-promise-of-reward. To put it another way, a _half-
implemented_ miniviewer would be _much worse_ than boogers—so in order to come
up with the miniviewer, you can't rely on "evolutionary" customer feedback,
but rather have to use some "revolutionary" R&D as well.

~~~
Qz
Maybe I missed something, but I got the sense that the article was addressing
how humans should design for humans -- computers designing for humans is a
whole different story and doesn't seem to fit into the scope of what that
article was addressing.

As for evolutionary vs revolutionary, I think a main factor in how UI design
has progressed over the years has been how capable computers have been at
rendering and processing UIs. But I think we're at the point (and have been)
where computers are capable of rendering whatever UI is best, but a huge
portion of our collective UI design knowledge is based on the time when it
wasn't capable of that. So we really need to rethink the core of the visual
computer interaction experience. There's a whole lot of useless cruft in every
major computer UI (win/max/*nix) that needs to go.

------
ww520
Very well said. Sometime you just have to trust your gut feeling on what's
best for the users, despite the lack of feedback.

