I'm reading a book called the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell at the moment. All in all, it's a terrible read, as it seems to be made up of a string of loosely related commentary which the author finds of interest. (Much like this 'blog, I hear you say.) However, it contains some interesting threads (much like this 'blog, I hear you say), and has reminded me of a few things.
Recently, my friend (too strong a word?) Alan wrote a post entitled Unfreezing the Interface, which among other things talks about how difficult it is to change a design feature/flaw once it has reached a critical mass. The good example he talks about consists of the Back and Forward buttons (see above) which Marc Andreessen incorporated into Mosaic, the first successful internet browser. At the time, I'm sure little thought went into these buttons, yet they remain to this day, albeit with the added feature of dropdowns enabling multi-step hopping. Rightly or wrongly, they are so widely used now that a decision to move away from this type of navigation would give any browser a significant handicap in a saturated market.
I remember the advent of the revolutionary look-and-feel of Windows '95. Having been on Windows NT 3.51 at the time, myself and my friend and then colleague Bal held off on the upgrade 'due to stability concerns' given the size of the files that we were dealing with. The actual reason, as I remember, was that we didn't want to change, as NT 3.51 had given us something that we liked and that we were comfortable with. When I did finally make the move, it was with much resentment (albeit in the short-term), as my world had been turned upside down. The lack of meaningful competition in the OS market meant that Microsoft had the luxury of being able to revolutionise the PC experience without significant concern of losing market share.
It seems a shame that the level of comfort that we humans develop for the steady-state is such a barrier to innovation, even when what we currently have is flawed. Consider the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard layouts for example. Dvorak has been around for about 70 years, but in the 60 years before it came about, QWERTY had become sufficiently commonplace to ward off superior competition. The argument for Dvorak is even stronger now, as the problem of typewriter keys getting jammed with one another is a thing of the past. Yet 50 years from now, I would be amazed if anything other than QWERTY is the standard. (I've never before realised how difficult it is to type QWERTY, btw.)
Similarly, there was a programme on TV in the UK some time ago about two designers who were tasked with re-designing some items that were in widespread use starting from a clean sheet of paper. The two editions I remember featured the bra and the toilet. Both of their creations shared some features of their predecessors but had notable differences. I've not seen either one on the market since.
It would be interesting to see how a bunch of people who had not been exposed to Microsoft would group and name the menu options that can be accessed from Excel 2003 or the wider Office suite. (Do such people exist?) Edit (as a group) suggests that you might be changing something, but contains the read-only Find function, probably because from a technical perspective it is closely aligned to the Replace function. Microsoft would be bold to radically move from the current groupings, however.
At first we put up with design flaws (or are not aware of their existence), and later we learn to embrace them. Once they're embraced, it's so difficult to get rid of them.
