First, Thank you all for voting for my previous blog post in the Bloodhound Blog People Choice’s. That was a nice little treat to learn about over the weekend! Now onto your regularly scheduled programming.
As the person that is conceptualizing an application, you may be so close to it, that you start to get tunnel vision. Often times there are sleaker, better, more appropriate choices that just go unconsidered because of this. This concept is probably better visualized than explained.
The example also spurred the idea of the post – so its real world, and not Jedi Sorcery.
Today I wanted to find a Chase bank ATM. Obvious first place, Chase.com. After finding the right navigation path to the branch/ATM locator, I was confronted with this search interface:
Whoa!, there is a lot going on in there – Including reading of some instructions on what needs to be entered. Needless to say, my ADD kicked in, and I tried an alternate – there was too much reading for me.
I went to Google Maps. I simply told it what and where – how much more natural is that?
It did its thing, and gave me a bunch of options.
Maybe I am more familiar with Google, so it seemed natural. But who these days isn’t familiar with a search box ‘ask and you shall receive’ type promise?
I recall creating my first Listing Search interface many moons ago. We had the simple and advanced interface. We were so proud with the advanced, grew so intimate with it, that we didn’t even realize it was the most difficult and confusing arrangement of choices and options. ‘Hold Control’ to add more areas, ‘include results with X or Y’. Hardly anyone used the advance interface. It was a sad realization.
That’s why I like Trulia’s concept of filter after search. To me it was one of those concepts that was so obvious, that until you saw it in action, you didn’t quite get it. Its more intuitive than having all these options upfront, and gets the user to the data quicker.
It’s like going into the grocery store, unless you know exactly which cereal you want, you need to get to the cereal aisle before you pear down ‘Sugar or healthy’, ‘On Sale or Not’, etc. Many of my favorite cereals would have never been found if there I selected a specific type without ever knowing what else was available.
So – moral of the story – don’t fall in love with a design choice, it may not be the best and more straight forward one.
w00t to that… the problem is the common. too many amateur designers create the interface, and said interface design goals are what is easy for _them_ not for their users.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees… Sometimes I get so focused on my approach to the design element I lose site of the function. Great post!