Comments on: Childrens toys leading UI design?

By: Miles Burke

Miles Burke — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:19:04 +0000

Nice work Ben, good reading.

By: Man with no blog : » Kids and Interfaces - Gary Barber

Man with no blog : » Kids and Interfaces - Gary Barber — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:14:13 +0000

[...] lesson here as pointed out by Ben Winter-Giles kids see things in a much purer focused simple application, they trust 100% that the device will [...]

By: benwintergiles

benwintergiles — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:16:45 +0000

ROFL. Thank you for the comment there Tuna.

There is something in the idea of not making people think.

I’ve run numerous ‘fish tanks’ with some users clicking happily up to 20 times and more, as long as they had a good sense that they were on the right track. That was fascinating to see happen.

One performance metric I didn’t look at but would have loved to was how fast in comparison the test scenario was completed in using the long simple navigation vs. a shorter more complex one.

I spoke about this (odd one out theory) with my team yesterday, and they pointed out so obviously to me that this could easily and likely very successfully applied to the “go forward” buttons in applications.

eg. the “Submit” button on a feedback form could be coloured differently to highlight it as the most obvious ‘go forward’ option for the user. Also I expect now it would be well used in a workflow, or wizard style application.

Serves me right for blogging at midnight I guess.

By: Tuna

Tuna — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:54:29 +0000

Reminds me of “don’t make me think” – Steve Krug. Web site visitors don’t follow instructions they muddle through it all, following an information trail, they are happy as long as the link trail is intuitively obvious to follow click counts mean little. You did the same with the packaging.

But Ben I don’t think you can get away with claiming all those toys as Design R&D and right them off on Tax.