It’s Time for Author-Centered Design
When I started teaching media creation to Web designers, the first text everyone handed me was Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It’s a fun, quick read. Krug explains that a good website or any other computer interface shouldn’t call attention to itself.
“Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store,” says Krug. I’ll take his metaphor a step further. A good website leads us through its pages like a supermarket sweeps us into its aisles and past its displays.
Yet Krug’s title—Don’t Make Me Think—makes us stop and think. It’s the type of thought-provoking writing I encourage in my students. Playing the devils’ advocate, Krug’s thesis is counterintuitive, but it sits atop a book that is well researched and logically argued. It’s a clickbate headline that proves true.
Krug encourages simple, invisible guidance with a title that is glaringly multifaceted. What’s going on here?
The contradiction resides in the difference between writing’s delivery and its message. Writing, just like one of Krug’s websites, is best when its interface doesn’t call attention to itself. When we stop and notice the words in a sentence, it indicates a mistake—a misspelling, an unfamiliar term, or some other grammatical hiccup that forces us to go back and reread.
Otherwise, our eyes move across paragraphs effortlessly, letting us concentrate on the concepts within the language. An essential part of writing talent is an ability to keep ideas clear and readable. So Krug, when he says, “eliminate instructions entirely,” is correct, to a degree.
Problems arise when students and designers and users of the Web want to take Krug’s thesis further—when they want ideas themselves to go down easy. The messages within writing, media, or a website should be anything but user-friendly.
Writing a set of how-to instructions is an essential assignment in my Web workshop The Interactive Voice, and I expect one of three outcomes from students.
The best outcomes teach me how to do something unique. These students understand how to instruct, and they also understand the challenge and the value of sharing a singular process. It’s more engaging for readers to learn the unusual way a grandmother makes dumplings or the elaborate algorithm behind taking an ancient sailing vessel out to sea than it is to cook a traditional recipe or prepare a dinghy.
Most of my students write instructions for the latter—some standard method—but this is still a fine exercise in logic if they can take me through an entire process successfully with words alone.
I worry about the third set of students that demonstrate how to make Minute Rice or flip the ignition on an Evinrude motor. They write “How to Search Online.” Step one, go to Google.com. Step two, fill in the blank. Maybe it’s just mid-semester laziness, but I wonder if they know the difference between creating a set of instructions and pointing at one—between writing the rules and following what is already user-friendly.
User-friendly design doesn’t strengthen muscle. If the goal is to lay out an easy path, there’s none of the resistance that tears and builds cellular wall—or individual character. That’s fine when we can go faster in a car than on a horse or move a computer from our desk to our pocket, but there is a labor to knowledge and communication that we don’t want technology to ease or reduce. That labor is thought itself.
When I started teaching writing to user-experience designers, I had to settle the concepts of users, readers, and authors in my head and in my lectures first. Readers follow an algorithm. Authors create the algorithm. Users are somewhere between the two, depending on how much they follow and how much they lead.
User-experience designers can’t be users; they must be authors. They have to understand what is unfriendly before they can make it invisible, and their websites need more than just “content.” Yet just like I worry about that third tier of students that can only follow instructions, I worry that the successful executions of user-experience design have taught too many of us that the world should be user-friendly—that the difficulties that make us human can be fixed.
Irrational thinking like that might find the other essential part of writing talent—complex, critical thought—as something unwanted. Opposition to one way of thinking and any other hiccup along the user-friendly road could appear unnatural, instead of as logical outcomes of a complex universe.
Ernest Hemingway’s simple and clear language helped us interface and wrestle with his difficult stories and the unfriendliness of the human condition. Talk with a good friend might make us laugh or cry or scowl, but as long as it keeps us from retreating into ourselves or another room, we’re engaged and evolving.
Website and application design can do the same. Video game users build more mental muscle than Facebook users because the interface is designed to challenge more than ease the experience. I would argue the most user-unfriendly video games—for example, Ryan and Amy Green’s video game about their son’s unsuccessful battle with cancer—are the most interactive, even if they are too painful to play.
The best communication confronts and updates our current and always-limited understanding of our complicated environment. Our most influential authors don’t teach us to follow; they inspire us to think and author in kind. Their clear instruction to step away from what is comfortable and create the dynamic interaction—I’d call that author-experience or author-centered design.
We also call it good art and good conversation.