Comments on: Cookbook user experience, anyone?

By: Vjekoslav Babic

Vjekoslav Babic — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:25:53 +0000

Christina: it’s almost like that old wisdom: “Give a man a fish; feed him for a day. Teach him to fish; feed him for a lifetime”. Overengineering is bad because it only achieves limited benefits, and causes trouble down the road (support, upgrade…)

By: Christina Belding

Christina Belding — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:44:35 +0000

Vjeko-this was great post (and had several of us in the office absolutely howling because we could totally relate)!!

I just love it when I come in contact with users who have adopted the mentality ‘my job doesn’t require me to think…like ever’. These poor souls actually forget that they even know how to think because they aren’t required to, because ‘that’s what the system is for’.

Seems that many times we over-engineer applications to accommodate for the lower end user when it might be better to teach them how to do something a little more challenging. (It’s the old, “ignorance is expensive”).

Thanks so much for your fantastic writing!!!
C

By: Vjekoslav Babic

Vjekoslav Babic — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:29:35 +0000

Erik, Dave: I’m glad to learn you had similar experiences, and that I’m not the only one seeing a problem with this; you can easily look at it from another perspective: heck, if it helps people be faster, what’s the problem? (imho, the problem is confusing speed with productivity, or effectiveness; or what a friend of mine uses to say: confusing movement with action).

Dave: about macros, I believe there was a utility from ExpandIT (www.expandit.com) which allowed something like this, but I am not sure if it is their Launch utility or did they have something else specifically for this purpose.

By: Dave Roys

Dave Roys — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:48:16 +0000

Hi Vjeko, fantastic post. Well written and very funny. I’ve definitely experienced a lot of this when training users and doing systems analysis – it’s definitely a warning when people distill a thought process into such a stream of key presses that get executed on auto pilot. It’s just a shame we can’t create macros in NAV that would allow the computer to remember the process for us. Maybe one day this feature will come.

By: Erik Ernst

Erik Ernst — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:54:57 +0000

Hehe, great article! It reminds me of my first job (before getting into IT, I was actually a trainee within accounting and sales). Whenever I started learning a new area my supervisor gave me a page from her “System Cookbook”.
The last time I heard about it was a few years ago, when one of my friends told me about her first contact with SAP. She was used to work with Windows based system, where she could use her intelligence to find out how the system worked. But according to her, that was completely impossible with a system like her SAP. All she had to do was to remember her cookbook, with all the “codes” on how to enter a purchase order etc.
So hurray for the great UI of NAV. Remember Navision’s old slogan: “The beauty of simplicity!” (10-15 years ago)? That slogan could really be used today also.
My only fear about NAV 2009 is that each user can change their individual UI so much that the users in support will a lot more to do in the future, when the users are trying to explain how their screen looks!

By: Vjekoslav Babic

Vjekoslav Babic — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:15:39 +0000

Vibor,
Well, keyboard shortcuts are a great thing – they save you time, and you are definitely faster keying shortcuts than moving the mouse and clicking around – provided you know the shortcuts.
I myself have relied on shortcuts a lot in previous versions of NAV. Now I am somewhat pissed off, but getting along gradually, with the new shortcuts in NAV 2009 – because they are all changed! (I still don’t get why non-standard shortcuts for operations such as Show Statistics, or Post, had to be changed).
Shortcuts are great to do things faster. But learning shortcuts can cost you understanding the application over time–as it actually happened to this lady (and not only her, I’ve seen similar behavior with other users, but this specific occasion was extreme, and I didn’t even overdo with this description). The moment you start remembering that you are doing F12, Ctrl+2, Down, Right, 4 times Down, Enter, F5, PgDn, Enter, F11 and start forgetting that you are actually doing Sales, Order Processing, Orders, showing a list of orders and picking one, then posting it, is the moment the system became the owner of the process, and you became a slave. With NAV it is difficult, because although you can do everything using keyboard, the UI is intuitive, but with some other systems I’ve seen there is no intuition you can apply, and users just start memorizing shortcuts.
It reminds me of the time when I first saw a listing of a computer program. I saw it as some arcane hocus-pocus that wakes computer from some idle state and makes it perform some pre-defined complex task; all those code lines represented some random pattern which is then recognized by the machine (okay, I was an 8 year old kid at the time). But if you approach a programming language in this way, you can memorize a listing and always have computer perform some task for you, but that specific task, that task only, and always that task, if you wanted to have it do something else, you would just be able to stand clueless. So – the computer owns you, not vice versa.
But if you turn it around, and you understand what code means, then you can make the computer do whatever you want, not only just those things that you memorized.
Apply this to shortcuts – by having a UI which is complex, and forces you to memorize a sequence of shortcuts, rather than understanding what you are really doing, you force users to willingly not understand the system, which means they’ll ever only be able to do the tasks that, well, the system “programmed” them to do, i.e. they will not own the system, but the system will own them.
Ohmy, what a philosophy
Anyway, I prefer the way user interfaces look today, than back then years or decades ago. RoleTailored UI (but also the previous NAV UI, but to a lesser extent) helps you understand the application and the process, and doesn’t have you memorize some obscure shortcuts.

By: Vibor (UXPassion.com)

Vibor (UXPassion.com) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:54:22 +0000

Hey Vjeko, this is really interesting article. But now when you are mentioning RoleTailored UX and “keyboarding” – what is your view on our current support for shortcuts and keyboarding features in RoleTailored Client – talking about MS Dynamics NAV 2009. I’d be really interested to hear – also feel free to little “r” me if you would like to go deeper into this topic.

Besides that, I really liked your “cookbook” experience – It makes me wonder should we go and try to create some kind of text-based UI/UX instead sticking with GUI, and not it’s not a joke or provocation… for some specific tasks, that actually might have sense!