Windows Or Mac
When you’re designing a product for humans, it helps to keep imaginary users in mind. The more realistic the imaginary
user is, the better you’ll do thinking about how they use your thing.
My imaginary user is
Pete.
Pete is an accountant for a technical publisher who has used Windows for six years at the office, and a bit at home. He is fairly competent and technical. Pete has never used an Apple Macintosh. “They’re too expensive,” he’ll tell you. “You can get a 3.6 GHz PC with 2 gigs of RAM for the price of...” OK, Pete. We get it.
One day Pete’s friend Gena asks him for some computer help. Now, Gena has a Macintosh iBook, because she loves white computers. When Pete sits down and tries to use Gena's Macintosh, he quickly gets frustrated. “I hate these things,” he says. He is, finally, able to help Gena, but he’s grumpy and unhappy. “The Macintosh has such a clunky user interface.”
Clunky? What’s he talking about? Everybody knows that the Macintosh has an elegant user interface,
right? The very paradigm of ease-of-use?
On the Macintosh, when you want to resize a
Window, you have to grab the bottom right hand corner to resize it. On Windows, you can resize from any
edge. When Pete was helping Gena, he tried to widen a window by dragging the right edge. Frustratingly, the whole window moved, rather than resizing as he expected.
On Windows, when a message box pops up, you can tab to a button and hit the
space bar to press that button. On the Mac, space doesn’t work. When Pete got alerts, he tried to dismiss them using the space bar, like he’s been doing subconsciously for the last six years.
The first time Pete tried that on the Mac, nothing happened. Without even being aware of it, Pete banged the space bar harder, since he thought that the problem must be that the keyboard did not register his tapping the space bar. Actually, it did—but it didn’t care! Eventually he used the mouse.
Right, Pete. We know better. His feelings come despite the fact that the Macintosh really is quite easy to use—for Mac users. It’s totally arbitrary which key you press to close a window. The Microsoft programmers probably thought that they were adding a cool new feature by letting you resize windows by dragging any edge. The Apple programmers probably thought they were adding a cool new feature when they let you move windows by dragging any edge.
The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond? If it didn’t, the user is going to feel like they can't control the interface, and they're going to be unsuccessful. That's all there is to it. Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected. Tattoo this on your forehead. Backwards, so you can read it in the mirror