Week 3 - Smart or Shiny

In deciding whether time is better spent on smarts or improving the interface, I hate to be the guy that takes the middle ground and is accused of just wanting to please everyone, but I honestly believe you have to balance between the two to have the best finished product. If you focus on one or the other too much, there can be problems on both ends.

If you focus too much of your time on smarts, even though you may have a ton of features and cool things an application is capable of, the user may never get to use these features because they cannot find them or it is difficult to get access to them. Without a good interface for the smarts that are developed, the smarts may go unused and then the time to develop them was wasted. An example of this might be the constant improvements and additions made to Microsoft's Office programs. There are tons and tons of different features available to the user, but they are so deeply buried in menu upon menu upon menu that the user gets fed up with searching for them and they remain obscure. The changes to the menu system in the latest Office helped to an extent, but there are still problems that need to be addressed in that realm.

On the other hand, if you focus too much on the interface, then there are no real useful smarts to include in it. You may have "Rolodex" menus in Vista, but is there really a purpose to that than to make the new OS look cool on commercials? I don't think I've really talked to anyone who's actually used that feature besides the first time they start up Vista. Additionally, turning back to Microsoft Office, we see the help feature suffers from the same problem: both the avatar helpers and the help menu itself. The little dog or Clippy might be cute, but they are not of much help. Perhaps to a user who is completely new to Office, these feature might be slightly welcoming, but once they've learned the basics and want to do more, the help features offer very little. The help menu itself, and the search feature that comes along with it, are so poorly made that, on top of wading through menu after menu, as discussed above, you do not have an easy out via the help system. For the most part, or at least in my experience, you cannot simply search "[insert super secret feature here]" and actually get legitimate results. There are no smarts behind the help system namely the search capabilities.

As you can see, there are negatives to focusing one's time to either smarts or interface alone and the only real way to get the best finished product is to work on both in equal increments. However, if it came down to crunch time, and only one or the other could be completed, I would say it is probably better to focus on smarts. While the menu system in Office may be clunky, if you really want to find and use one of the more obscure features, it may be hard to find, but at least it is there. If Office was just a shiny word processor with a fancy interface that had only bold, underline and italics features, I believe people would grumble more about that than having to search through mountains of menus. Of course, with what we will be doing in this class (surfaces, motion control, etc.), ability to learn HOW to use menus and features also becomes an issue, but that is a discussion for another day.