Week 7 - Breaking Down "Smarts" and Autocomplete

In designing an interface, I believe there are three different categories that need to be considered: basic functionality, special/additional features and overall look. In a past blog, I stated that "smarts" were more important than "shininess". Smarts in that blog encompassed both basic functionality AND special features, but here I plan to discuss the difference between the two categories within smarts. This is not to say that the overall look of an interface does not deserve its own discussion, but that will be one for another day. So, in discussing the two categories of smarts, we come again to the question of which is more important: basic functionality or special features. In this comparison, as opposed to the smarts vs. shininess debate, the answer seems a little more clear to me. If your interface lacks basic functionality, then it really serves no purpose. If your interface is designed to do one thing, but cannot complete the main task, then it serves no purpose. It may have bells and whistles and so on, but, in the end, if it cannot do what it is marketed to do, no one is going to want to use it and, if you're running a company that needs the business, obviously, you're going to suffer.

However, if you are able to implement basic functionality, I believe special features are the next step in implementation of a design for your interface. As I stated before, smarts are more important than shininess and that includes both categories of smarts. Special features are what distinguish your product from the competition. Sure, there are a ton of search engines out there, but it seems that the most success, beyond having accurate searches, are those that have additional features that allow you to narrow down your search or search among images and so on. What inspired me to write about this topic in the first place was the auto-complete feature. It may seem like a fairly trivial feature in the long run, but I've always found it to be very useful especially when I'm searching for something where I might only know one detail. With auto-complete, I can see, almost instantly, what other searches have been done with my search term in them and can decide if any are appropriate for what I am trying to find. This is especially help on sites like YouTube where I might know the first or last name of a singer or band, or maybe just one word in the main title of a song. With auto-complete, once I type that one word, there's almost always an option that pop-ups that rings a bell in my head and directs me to what I'm looking for.

Features like auto-complete are what make website interfaces more competitive. Without the bells and whistles, even if your product has great basic functionality, people are probably going to be turned off by the simple design and lack of further options. The next step would be to make things look pretty, but, as Google has shown us, you don't always need a "shiny" website to be popular. Their basic design is almost welcoming in that you are not bombarded with sidebars and advertisements and pop-ups and who knows what else. However, "look" is a discussion for another day. For now, in summary, while basic functionality is important to implement at first, it is important to develop, and probably continue to develop, special features, or bells and whistles that make your design and interface more appealing and useful than the competitions'.