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From Cooper’s About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design 3

Controls that guide our interaction with the interface

With Chapter 21, Cooper focuses on controls. Imperative controls, selection controls, most of these controls are second-nature to any computer-literate individual. Imperative controls are buttons that take action. Think about the popular choice you come across, “OK” and “CANCEL”. You pick the ok, it submits and continues. The cancel gets me as far away from the action as possible. Another great example: the weekly or daily virus scans. Do I start the scan, or do I continue to ignore and ask the computer to kindly remind me later that I have neglected to protect/update my computer, again. It’s the snooze button of computer interaction. I did appreciate the comparison to hyperlinks. Newsflash, buttons take action, where links specifically connect you and navigate the web (externally), the site (internally), or places on the page itself (What hyperlinks were originally suppose to do: send you to anchors on the page or the <a> tag).

Do you flip-flop or separate?

Another control relatable, especially to online music lovers, is the flip-flop button. Cooper emphasizes how it saves space but creates confusion to the users unless spelled out. On the flip side, using two buttons waste real estate on the interface but clearly defines what is selected. A great example is Pandora.com. They use a flip-flop button for the play/pause actions, but emphasize the “pause” status by graying out the album art and putting a big “paused” sign. If that is not spelling it out, I don’t know what is.

Flip-Flop button control for play/pause feature

Additional points of interest from chapter

Radio buttons are mentioned, as well as drop downs, text editing controls, and pretty much any other form-related control familiar to computer interfaces. A few additional notes of personal interest:

- Scrolling text horizontally = bad; again, scrolling text horizontally = bad. Good tip for those not familiar with how people read the web. You are more likely to scroll down than scroll horizontally. That’s why most recent mice have a center wheel that rotates up and down. (Could you imagine a mouse with a horizontal wheel from left to right? That mouse would suck with usability.)

- Bounded controls with fixed outcomes. I always think of controls on music editing software. Dials that control levels, the idea was to mimic a soundboard. Some GUIs work, others may not.

- Unbounded equals validation. Cooper mentions how text edit controls are unbounded because it potentially accepts whatever the user plugs into the interface. I especially appreciated the review on active vs. passive validation. Active doesn’t allow keystrokes if the input is not validated, where passive validation will wait for the user to input the value before attempting to validate. The first thing I thought of as an example was password generators for passive. It judges if you have enough diverse characters plugged before accepting the new password. On a side note, I thought of the 1995 movie Hackers for this and laughed at how in the movie, they emphasized the most popular passwords used by powerful companies with egos: love, sex, secret, and god.  We have come a long way from using three-letter words as valid passwords.

Shifting focus to menus

In Chapter 22, Cooper outlines the importance of menus in interaction design. Most people are familiar with menus, buttons, and navigation associated with this chapter. A few points I took from this:

- Command-line interface takes me back as far as DOS. I remember working with my mother in DOS to reconfigure a whole computer through command prompts and actions. Type in a command, press enter, and poof! You have control. In most programming languages, this is still very much alive and used to build applications, reconfigure settings, and pretty much do whatever you like, hence hackers.

- Sequential hierarchical menus read from a list of choices and provide the option to choose one. We still see this in programming and on your computer. Think about when your computer unexpectedly shuts off. When you reboot, you are given the choice to start the computer normally, enter safe mode, or enter configuration options.

Cooper stresses the need to organize actions, navigation, and buttons through menus. We are familiar with and take advantage of these features all the time (file, edit, window, etc.). It is almost insane to think of a world of computers without these tools. It would be interesting to send us back to the “dark ages” of computers with only a command-line interface. Let’s thank Apple and Microsoft now for their contributions…

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