Recently, my company launched a new service. Part of developing the service was a long process of crafting a UI which is usable and clearly understood. However, I insisted on one feature which provides no clear usability enhancement: a 3D carousel to select a virtual machine template from a list.
A big hug goes out to the UI team leader who explained how this provides little in the way of usability. How, when there will be a lot of virtual machines, experienced users will prefer a quick sorted list. It was not easy to persevere. It was going tough when we discovered the carousel had a 100% CPU bug.
So, why insist of a such a feature?
Sometimes, crafting beautiful UI, which is memorable and useful can take precedence over the perfect usability of a list view. Of course, we have a list view button (on the top right side of the carousel) for experienced users. Such UI can feature in marketing collateral, in press released, etc.
So far, we’ve got raving reviews from our users…
So – not a silly feature after all.
3D carousel from Oxylus Flash
Funny, I was just learning about usability engineering in my Human Factors eng. class yesterday…
and yah – I do agree that a sexy appearance can make a whole lot of difference and stand out in the virtual sea of products, especially for the majority of us which aren’t your typical experienced user (not yet anyway..) and are easily distracted, that is assuming the system works properly, and well, is usable.
Hey Uri,
love your writing style and after reading through your posts which are all very interesting and educative, I think it might be a good idea to start a blog on my research and share knowledge so other would be aware and perhaps gain from my mistakes or (hopefully) share their personal experience – you know – the stuff you’ll never publish in a paper or present to an audience.
Thanks for the inspiration!