Hello there

Interaction designers prefer to use design patterns in their works. Design philosophy like UCD demands it. Design components that are ‘promoted’ to the pattern status have the advantage of being intuitive to users. It’s not something they have never seen before, and with such prior interaction experience, they don’t have to develop new cognitive style when using the application.

But sometimes an interface has to incorporate some sort of experimental pattern, be it a new navigation structure or mouseover action. What would be the best way to introduce this to users without resulting in a negative experience?

At Plurk, with the timeline concept, we are constantly studying how users are adapting to the design. I would like to share some tips and hopefully some might find them useful.

Keep it simple. Strip away uneccesary things.
Here we are already using an interface component that most users probably haven’t  seen before. The idea is to not make it any more complicated. The timeline concept that Plurk has is not exactly new in the non-geek world: there are already several projects/websites out there that are using it. When you compare those timelines with Plurk’s, you will notice that we don’t have things like a secondary timeline for navigation, zoom function, colorful guiding lines, drop down selections, expandable content or vertical dragging.

Keep it simple, as always. Let the data shines. Don’t overwhelm users with unneccesary bells and whistles because they are already trying to learn your new concept here. Don’t ever use experimental design because you want to WOW the users, but use it because you believe it will lead to a better interaction experience. We are working on a web application here, not a promotional/marketing website and at Plurk, we really do believe a ‘river stream’ display design is a better way to get an overview look of your social activity, as opposed to the traditional list-based inteface.

Keep the attention away from the experimental component
When I first designed Plurk’s interface, I wanted users to not pay too much attention to the timeline itself, but rather what’s on it. User adaptation process is much easier when the UI is not forcing them to learn new tricks in order to get things done. The content is there (in this case, the plurks). Users will see it right away. The most recent plurks will always appear upon loading the profile page without users having to zoom or expand or click on anything on the timeline.

Collapse-view on gmail is a brilliant UI idea. But it’s not something new users will notice right away, because they are busy reading their emails. When the email conversations get longer, the AHA! moment steps in.

Good ol’ spoon-feeding and hand-holding
Help tips and text can be useful in introducing new things. Contextual explanation clarifies hidden aspects of UI components. It is being used when the UX team doesn’t think the self-exploratory ‘click and learn’ process will work. The reason I put this as the last tip is because I think we should use them with discretion. It is unwise to have a full blown 500 characters, 6 slides, tips popups splattered across the UI. Keep the text concise and meaningful. Make the tips elements adaptive (in most cases, only first time users need to see it). Don’t make them appear in areas where they might be obtrusive to other UI interactions. Always have an option to make all tooltips go away.

I like the recent FB redesign. But the yellowish tooltips are too much. And they won’t go away unless I hunt them down with the X one by one. =(