Simple vs. Complex User Interface Design:
David Armano Weighs In

– David Armano, VP of Experience Design, Critical Mass

 

 

 

 

When David Armano, VP of experience design at Critical Mass, dialed into our conference call, he wasn’t aware that nearly a dozen UIRC colleagues were listening in on mute, hanging on his words. To coin a phrase, when Armano speaks … well, you know the rest.

 

What follows is a compelling three-way conversation about the relative values of high and low experience design. What started out as a chat between “two UI guys” turned into a wonderful exchange of ideas between David and two other thought leaders, Tim Wood and Lance Christmann, both of EffectiveUI.

 

Tim Wood:
To start, can you give our readers a quick recap about your background and your role at Critical Mass?

 

David Armano:
Sure. I studied a combination of computer graphics and visual design at Pratt Institute, and then started my career in print, moved into broadcast and made the leap to the Web in early ’97. I’ve been working on the Web ever since, and started on the design side with the Chicago Tribune, doing a little bit of everything — some IA and some visual design. Roles were not very well-defined back then.

 

Then I spent about almost six years at Agency.com, working on digital marketing initiatives, mostly Web site focused. After that I spent a couple of years at Digitas and most recently, Critical Mass where I’m the VP for creative in the Chicago office. I oversee a group of visual designers, art directors, writers, motion designers and content strategists.

 

Tim Wood:
That’s a great segue into the context of today’s discussion. I want to get your take on two contemporary user experience trends that we see on the Web today — that in many ways seem contradictory or divergent. That is, simple design versus complex design. On one hand we have sites like Delicious, Google Apps and Craigslist, all of which have a very minimal hypertext-based UI presentation. On the other hand we are seeing a strong emergence of RIAs of various flavors — in Flex, Silverlight and AJAX — that support a very rich presentation of user interface elements, as well as very dynamic interaction. Do you see these two trends as being contradictory or do you see them as complementary?

 

David Armano:
That’s a really big question without a black-and-white answer. Way back in 2003, Kevin Mullet wrote a Macromedia white paper titled The Essence of Effective Rich Internet Applications which was a precursor to what we’re talking about today regarding high and low design. He made a great case for rich design. In hindsight, I would have thought that was where everything was going because it just made so much sense.

 

Mullet proposed that when you take something with function and value, which most applications have whether they’re Web-based or desktop-based, you should create a really engaging experience around it using the “breaking the page” metaphor. That makes total sense because when we interact with the Web, it’s not natural to wait for a page to load. Back then, it was safe to assume that everything was going to move in the rich direction. But then the curveball got thrown, as you mentioned, with the popularity of simple HTML sites like Delicious, Flicker, Twitter and Google Apps. Why are they gaining so much steam?

 

It’s a conversation worth having. I think the reason why the so-called low design movement is effective despite its imperfections, is because the barrier to use is very low. You can just jump on, and immediately start using those sites without having to download plug-ins or widgets.

 

Tim Wood:
We speak abstractly about high versus low design, wanting to associate high with rich Internet applications, and low with the more traditional hypertext-based UI presentations. But is that really the case?

 

David Armano:
I don’t think it is. Hahlo for example, which has been upgraded with added features, is so commonsense it’s almost stupid. But at the end of the day it’s more about the relevancy of the features and how little thought they require. I’m using Hahlo 3 on my iPhone, which has a delight factor regardless of the animation or the lack of transition, regardless of how much or little I have to scroll. It’s just very relevant. It does what I want it to do. So I don’t know if that’s a complex or simple thing, I just know that it works for me. When you look at the landscape of Web applications and desktop applications, if something doesn’t work contextually, it becomes a moot point even though it might be a great technological advancement.

 

Tim Wood:
Absolutely. In terms of high versus low experiences, do you think the successful emergence of RIAs is because they appeal to the base level human emotions versus the more functional appeal like Google Apps?

 

David Armano:
We need to define what we mean by high and low design. The common traits that I see in high design are a certain amount of polish and fluidity. Flicking elements and wiggling icons are high design techniques and touches, is all. When you zoom out and can see different pages, I would almost put that in a different high design category. But here’s where the theory of effective high design falls apart — the emotional satisfaction embedded in the Cragislist experience. And you can’t get any lower design than Craigslist.

 

I think the theory of rich Internet applications is valid for sure, but you can’t discount the emotional appeal that comes with a site like Craigslist. I’ll use another example from my five years working on a B2B site for Grainger, a large B2B distributor. I used to debate my creative director about how to represent that brand — wanting to use more imagery and the right kind of imagery to get the job done. He asked why we didn’t use pictures of people helping other people? That’s what this brand was about. The reality of it was is that the fewer images, the more streamlined the experience. We use the phrase “dreadfully efficient.” The easier we made it for people to use the application and the less time that they spent using Grainger.com, the better they felt about the brand.

 

Tim Wood:
In my opinion, Delicious and Google Apps are very easy to use, intuitive and straightforward, and their adoption rates speak to their success. But I struggle with Craigslist’s success. Do you think that the Craigslist experience is successful just because it’s so usable?

 

David Armano:
I look at people like my wife who use it, like it and actually do things with it. It becomes part of their lifestyle. You could also critique the usability of YouTube, but look at what it did for video. You can probably also critique YouTube in terms of which parts are high design, which parts are low design but it solved a problem that we didn’t even know existed. Craigslist did the same thing. Could it be better? Probably, but it works really well. The same goes for eBay, which could also be better. But you can’t discount the emotional part of an experience.

 

Tim Wood:
Are you saying that people are more willing to accept experiential failings as a trade-off for successful utility?

 

David Armano:
I think it’s a reality. Whether we’re developing using a high-end design or a low-end technique, we need to focus on what the project does and what kinds of needs it actually fulfills at the end of the day. We should think about usability as a continual process.

 

To be honest, I go back and forth on Craigslist because on one hand, I’d love to see someone take it and make it look good and build a brand around it visually. But on the other hand, the brand is what it is and has formed itself organically. I will say this though, as far as rich Internet applications go, there is an opposite effect. For example, people in the financial industry use very rich Internet financial applications all day long — Web-based and standalone — for trading and other functionality that you just couldn’t do in low design.

 

Tim Wood:
Data visualization is very critical when trying to manage large-scale information in space across multiple screens. Engaging, high designs come into play when it’s necessary to perform and function more effectively than flat screens of hypertext and ASCII files all jumbled up.

 

David Armano:
Sometimes high design is the only option. But, some consumer experiences can go high or low and there actually could be advantages to going low. In financial services, there’s no option but to go high. Traders want to see everything at once and they want control over it. You can’t do those things without a rich Internet application.

 

In the white paper that I referenced earlier, Mullet talks about this idea of fitness of purpose. A basic example that he gives is: you shouldn’t use a mallet to try to drive a nail and you shouldn’t use a hammer to pound in something that could break. In our discussion today, the same holds true; you really have to think about when to go with a rich Internet application and when not to.

 

Tim Wood:
It seems to me that we keep coming back to the fact that we always need to stay focused on the user and practice classic user-centric methodologies to make decisions about the user experience.

 

David Armano:
You have to understand users, period. If Craigslist went rich, I don’t know how my wife would react. Some things might be better, but it’s hard to say.

 

Another thing we haven’t even tapped into … that I don’t even know how to classify —are sites like Bright Kite. It has some low-end design qualities like pagination scrolling, but then it also mixes in techniques that are more rich Internet application-ish, with windows opening up, and things dimming, and a certain modular layout. So a third class of hybrid applications is emerging.

 

Tim Wood:
Do you have any other examples of hybrid applications?

 

David Armano:
They’re hard to pin down. I’ve seen telltale signs on SlideShare. You could even make the argument that on a very basic level, Facebook does some hybrid things with AJAX, such as deletions of messages without having to refresh.

 

Tim Wood:
YouTube is a hybrid experience more or less, as well.

 

David Armano:
It’s interesting, like many things, that what starts off as a purist discussion: What’s better, high/low? What’s better, complex or simple? The answer tends to emerge from the intersection. Take one of our examples — SlideShare. There are many things about it that you would not categorize as not being a rich Internet application, but there are also lots of small touches that start pushing it into that hybrid area. Not everything has to refresh and multiple things can happen instantaneously. A little bit of the best of both worlds is becoming a larger trend.

 

Tim Wood:
In terms of longer-term trends, do you think Web 2.0, utility-oriented hypertext interfaces will start to fall out of favor? I don’t ever expect them to go away, but do you see them yielding to hybrid experiences and full RIA types of experiences?

 

David Armano:
Another big question. I don’t tend to make predictions. But I’ll look to the past for the sake of discussion. I’d be hesitant to say that the full-on RIA will become the trend because it really hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know if it will. But I will say this, if you look at the history of the Web, what tends to happen is that conventions take over, whether or not they’re well-designed. A good example of this is YouTube, which is a convention that does not provide the best user experience. But now, when people go to video sites, they expect it to act like YouTube. The point is that we now expect to see our videos in Flash because we just want it to work.

 

When you see conventions getting mass adoption, those conventions become the norm because people expect to see certain behaviors. Historically, Web behavior has been formed by a series of accepted conventions that work. Trends that become adopted are what influence design moving forward.

By the way, I want to ask you a question about the desktop version of eBay that EffectiveUI developed that really pushed the high design experience. Did you learn anything that is relevant to this discussion? Is Lance Christmann on the line, by any chance?

 

Lance Christmann:
David, hi, it’s been great listening in on this chat. We did learn some interesting things working on eBay Desktop. Actually, there’s an article here on the UIRC about how we built the eBay AIR application.

 

We targeted the segment of eBay users who were seeking a revamped, immersive, richer experience than on eBay.com. Many beta users were involved and subsequently, once it was released a lot of early adopters have been grabbing hold of it, especially around the Adobe AIR technology, and Flex as well.

 

The response has been great in that the experience really breaks the traditional Web site metaphor. When we got rid of the page-based metaphor, beta testers started submitting bug reports, asking, “Where are the back/forward buttons? How do I get back? How do I get forward?” And we’re trying to say, “Think of it as a desktop application that doesn’t involve a browser-based back/forward system.” That’s what we were trying to achieve. It was a weird mindset because people could not make the leap between the browser-based Web site and a desktop app. So we ended up using several metaphors throughout the application to capture some of the essence of the previous Web experience, which is very low-level design. We dialed it back and made some concessions to bring some Web elements into a richer desktop experience — to keep the barrier to entry low.

 

David Armano:
That speaks to the power of conventions. Conventions aren’t right or wrong, they are just the reality you have to deal with.

 

Lance Christmann:
It’s not just browser conventions, either. We were trying to take emotional and psychological conventions and bring them across devices instead of allowing the device to dictate its unique conventions. eBay users are actually attached to the brand first, and the conventions of the brand second.

 

David Armano:
Really interesting. That reminds me of a good question Tim asked earlier. Are high and low design compatible, incompatible or complementary? Signs seem to be pointing toward complementary and I’ll use this example: I really enjoy using Facebook on my iPhone, much more so than on the Web. The reason I like it, aside from it working and feeling like such a good experience, is that it’s relevant to me. I prefer to use Facebook in my downtime versus being tethered to my desk because there I feel guilty about avoiding more productive tasks. To go back to the eBay example, there may be a percentage of people who adopt the richer desktop version and adopt it either in addition to or in place of the Web version, but others may never make the switch.

 

In terms of a strategy, I wonder if it comes down to brands, organizations and companies getting used to versioning. That is, supporting different versions of applications based on how people want to actually engage with the company, the brand and the service.

 

Tim Wood:
I like the idea of giving the user as much control as possible, and enable them to define their own experiences. Ultimately, that’s where the real value is. If a user can customize and tweak the experience, it becomes much more relevant to them.

 

David Armano:
It’s much more about how the average user wants to interact with an experience, so if you can give them the right options at the right time, you’re more likely to actually keep them engaged.

 

Tim Wood:
I agree. I want to ask you about interacting with different devices in various contexts. Do you think peoples’ mindsets will become more creative in terms of conventions per platform, or do you think a new, higher level convention will emerge from general usage of applications on a mobile device, desktop or any device?

 

David Armano:
I think new, higher-level conventions will emerge. The name for them already exists —“situational” or “contextual” design.

 

It’s less about the conventions on my iPhone and more about what I want to do when I’m moving around.  For me, the pleasurable experience of using Facebook actually happens when I’m sitting on a train. I’m relaxed and it doesn’t feel like a chore for me. But on a computer, if I’ve got Facebook open and I’m trying to do messages and update contacts and I’ve got emails coming in, Facebook is more stressful for me. The way you engage with an application or service will be influenced by your surroundings. It’s not just physical surroundings. It’s also your state of mind.

 

Tim Wood, Lance Christmann:
David, we greatly appreciate your taking the time to speak with us today. It was huge. I enjoyed it very much.

 

David Armano:
Thank you, Tim and Lance. Great talking to you.

 

About David Armano
As VP of experience design for Critical Mass, David has the privilege of leading talented interdisciplinary teams across a variety of clients while leveraging his background as a creative problem solver and strategic thinker. David has more than 14 years’ experience in the creative field with the majority of his time spent in digital marketing and experience design. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 20 media and marketing blogs according to Advertising Age. David’s writing and visual thinking has been cited by Forrester, The Boston Globe and landed him in BusinessWeek on several occasions including their “Best of 2006.” Full bio http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/bio.html

 

About Tim Wood
Tim is currently the director of user experience at EffectiveUI, an award-winning provider of rich Internet applications and breakthrough interactive experiences. Prior to joining EffectiveUI, Tim was the creative director for design innovation and advanced development at Eastman Kodak Co., where he received international recognition for creativity and design excellence. For more than 10 years, Tim has persistently focused on radically transforming business through user experience. From Web services to consumer electronics and mobile devices, his passion for design has fueled an inherent desire to innovate and promote progressive methods of interaction design.

 

About Lance Christmann
Lance Christmann graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in film, animation and video from the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a freelance UI designer in 2000, creating interfaces for organizations such as Qwest, Lucent, Comcast and Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital. Lance was also the founder of Mustard Lab, a company that specialized in designing Web sites and game interfaces. In 2006, Lance was brought on as chief interface designer at EffectiveUI. His responsibilities include overseeing the design team and leading the direction of all EffectiveUI design projects. During his time there, Lance has directed the work of projects for NBC, eBay, the Discovery Channel and many others.