UX thoughts – Learning Phase Tools III

In my last post in the UX thoughts series, I wrote about how allowing the user to experiment and being consistent with the already existing knowledge of the user can help learning to use your software.

Reusing existing applications

If we are taking the consistency thing a bit further, the next step is to reuse already existing applications. For example, if you are creating a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, you may want to consider putting it inside Outlook. Chances are that your users already have a lot of contact data in Outlook – why not just add your unique features inside Outlook, and reuse their existing data and their knowledge of Office instead of inventing something totally new? Users will love the fact that they don’t have to reenter their data in a different system, and you will not have to build half of Outlook and Exchange Server from scratch.

Physical devices

This is the keyboard I am using at home.  It is fairly convenient, silent and feels good to type on. But from the UX point of view, what is most interesting is that it has small text on some of the keys. For example, on the front face of the “S” key, there is “* Save”, and on the front face of the V key there is “* Paste”. What happened here is that the most common shortcut keys of the Windows world have been transferred to the physical world – and computer newbies can learn these shortcuts just by looking at their keyboard!

Function search

Even in this series, I have often praised the Ribbon and said that I find it to be a great step forward in terms of UX. However, there is one big drawback of the Ribbon: it is new. Being new means that people have to get used to it. getting used to something takes time, and if you were fairly familiar with the old this can be a frustrating experience. There will be fallback on your productivity, you will hunt for features that you knew where to find in the old menu system by heart. This made quite a lot of people to hate Office 2007 and the Ribbon.

Microsoft has built into Office 2007 a feature called Office 2003 access key. For example, when you press ALT+I in Word 2007, it will pop up a small window, and tell you to continue your shortcut key sequence. This works OK, but most people were using the menus and toolbars, not the shortcut keys even for trivial tasks, like undo. Also, there is no way in Office 2007 to learn where things have been moved to.

Microsoft has of course realized this, and has launched a tool called “Interactive: Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide”. A horrible name, but the biggest problem is that it is online, and not built into Office. By the time the user starts to look for help on migration of his knowledge online, he will be very frustrated – and even then, finding this tool is not simple. The tool itself works OK though: it shows you a Flash version of the Office 2003 UI, and tells you where the commands and toolbar buttons, etc can be found in the new Office.

So, what is the solution to this problem? Search, of course. But let’s not search in Help (which is also a different application), let’s search in the Ribbon:

This is the Search Commands add-in. You just type in the search box, and it shows you the matching commands, buttons, etc in the results, allows you to get more help. But the most important part is that you can immediately activate the commands, and also learn where to find it later without search. Another noteworthy aspect of the Search Commands is that searching goes beyond just the name of the command itself. For example, in PowerPoint, if you search for “screen”, it will show how commands to change monitors, window management, etc. This makes the search functionality a lot more than just searching for commands – if you would like to know whether the application supports a given feature at all, you can search for the feature, and receive immediate feedback, with the added bonus of being able to immediately execute the command or learn where you can find it. There is one big problem with the Search Commands Feature: it is not part of the Ribbon, but only an unsupported add-in. That’s a shame as I am sure that a lot of the initial frustrations with the Ribbon and Office 2007 could have been avoided if Search Commands was in Office out of the box. And it is not included in Word 2010 CTP either… hear that, Microsoft? Put it in the product!

Another example where search helps during the learning phase (and the productivity phase, too) is Window Vista’s Control Panel, which has been further extended in Windows 7. The problem with XP’s Control Panel is that there are so many little applets, you are often hunting among them to find the one you need. And even then, the functionality you need can be buried so deep in tabs and sub-sub dialogs that you never found them. You had to follow the sometimes twisted logic of the original developers, and hope that you can figure out which category THEY thought the setting belonged to. Where do you change the IP address? In Computer Setting? Or Network Settings? Or Network Card settings? Or Communications?

In the new Control Panel, you can just type “IP” in the search box, and it immediately takes you to the right applet. There is still a considerable amount of guessing to do after this as  you have to select the right network adapter, and open two dialog boxes to find the proper setting, but still – this is a huge step forward both for learning functionality and then for accessing it quickly.