A small discussion ensued on my Friendfeed account when I tweeted “a large part of what people think is good UI is familiarity”. It was a response to Jeremiah Owyang’s tweet:

Everyone complains about MySpace’s user controlled”ugly” layouts, yet when we get a refined UI, many complain about FB’s changes

The point I wanted to make was that most negative feedback after a redesign comes from people who have gotten used to the older design. This is not to say that we should never redesign anything, but that we should pay a little less attention to people who just “liked it the way it was” and are unable to tell you why the new design isn’t working for them. Change is never easy for anybody; and change is what we designers do.

We are called to innovate, but keep things intuitive. While this seems somewhat of a contradiction, it is holds the secret to good design: Discipline.

I’m not a frequent visitor to MySpace because I cannot bear to look at the typical myspace webpage. While they showcase novel things that can be done on a webpage, they lacks the restraint of good design. All sorts of different media (audio, video, interactive polls) are thrown together mindlessly. It creates a mind-numbing drone in my skull just to think about it.

Discipline in design is a result of a lot of serious study. When Apple launched the iPod Touch and then later the iPhone, the interface was extremely innovative to mp3 players and mobile phones, but the interactive metaphors were tried and tested. The touch screen mimicked physical interaction - what you would experience if you pushed a piece of paper around with your finger. The zooming in and out interaction was similar to how you’d stretch and contract an elastic sheet of rubber. It is an amazing piece of work.

I’ve been keeping notes on how my daughter Anne interacts with our iMac at home. She finds it odd to move a third-party device (the mouse) rather than touching the screen directly. It requires user education (a compromise) to teach her that she has to double click on an icon to open it. She would rather speak its name loudly.

What is intuitive is different from what is learned. The time it has taken technology to evolve has taken us away from intuitive interfaces. It is only in recent times that technology is catching up, enabling us to control virtual objections with rules we inherently learn from the natural world.