User-Adjustable Interfaces
Posted July 4, 2010 @ 3:14 pm
My brother-in-law is an arborist and has an earth sciences degree. He’s a very smart guy, but the Internet and technology are not part of his day-to-day job. He uses the Internet in his spare time to relax and communicate with friends and family. Things like faceplant videos on YouTube make his day; mine, too. But YouTube, despite having good content, kinda sucks for him. Why?
Comments
While not ruining the experience entirely, the belligerence YouTube’s comments has made the time he spends there less enjoyable, and he’s not the only person who feels this way.
A quick Google search turns up at least a couple of methods for removing comments from YouTube. One solution, No YouNoobs, a script for Greasemonkey, has been installed almost 5,000 times.
YouTube isn’t the only site that has to deal with comment buffoonery. Engadget has, on a couple of occasions, turned off comments because of an out-of-control crowd. The Austin American-Statesman has problems controlling the rowdiness of the comments that spring up over complex, touchy topics like the weather.
Nerds like me remedy this situation with things like Greasemonkey scripts and Steven Frank’s shutup.css (which also exists now as a Safari extension). People without the knowledge of things like user scripts, extensions, and plugins have little recourse, though.
That sucks.
It sucks for users and it sucks for businesses who lose money over the fact that people will eventually go to less noisy venues to find entertainment.
If people are writing scripts to modify the way your site works—whether they’re removing comments, Flash content, or other parts of the page—you’ve got problems. Sure, 5,000 installs of No YouNoobs is a small segment of the total number of visitors that YouTube sees every day, but those 5,000 are people who have the knowledge to find, download, and install a user script. What about the rest of the people who hate comments on YouTube but don’t have the knowledge or wherewithal to seek out a solution?
If people are writing scripts and extensions to tweak your site, yes, you have problems, but you’ve also got definitive data about what those problems are, and with a little effort, you can probably fix them. How?
User-Adjustable Interfaces
Let people get rid of parts of the page that they don’t want to see. On most sites, this won’t compromise the design or layout.
A user-adjustable interface is tricky from a programmatic standpoint. But not that tricky.
This demo—which, as of today, only works in a Webkit-based browser like Safari or Chrome—uses the Twitter interface as an example. I picked Twitter because 1) I love the site, and 2) sometimes the trending topics get on my nerves.
Everything in this prototype is non-functional except for the Edit This Page button. Go ahead, click it.
The customizable bits of the sidebar start to jiggle like rearrangeable iPhone icons. Each removable box is highlighted in yellow. A close button and a hey-you-can-move-this-box indicator appear to show the user that boxes can either be reordered or removed entirely.
For the über-nerds, this demo uses HTML5 for layout, CSS3 for rounded corners and animations, and jQuery for drag-and-drop support.
The only thing needed to integrate this into an existing Web app would be an AJAX call to store the state of the sidebar when the user clicks the Save Changes button.
Why Bother?
All the hacks on the Internet can’t replace strong, purposeful, ingrained attention to the user experience. That includes listening to the community, whether they’re bringing problems to your front door or building and distributing scripts without telling you. People want to feel in control, and if they can’t get it from your product, they’ll find a way to get it through other channels (assuming your product is compelling enough to keep them from switching to a competing app).
Right now, users have a modicum of control over content. For example:
- I choose which RSS feeds to subscribe to.
- I can follow and unfollow people on Twitter.
- I can block folks and applications on Facebook.
As far as primary content is concerned, there are things I can do that make me feel as though I’m managing the content I get exposed to.
What I can’t do, at least not without some sort of third-party hackery, is modify the cruft that lies around the primary content that I’m trying to focus on (e.g., the reason I came to your site or signed up for your app in the first place).
The people designing sites have the ability to hand over more control to the user. The impetus shouldn’t be on your visitors to clean up a design that doesn’t make them happy. A user-adjustable interface won’t get rid of every annoyance on every site, but it goes a long way toward improving the overall experience and making the user feel as though he or she has more control. And that’s a huge win.
