Design means making choices. Choices about choices, even. What do you want your users to be able to do with your system? What choices do you want to give them? I think that in general, the better usability lies in restricting user choices as much as possible.

You see it everywhere. Like Microsoft vs. Apple for instance. Microsoft comes from a much looser design standpoint, one of providing users many many options. Heck, they even allow it in the programs that run on their machines. They don’t restrict the hardware that can be used with Windows. They let programs edit the registry data, or allocate memory in really stupid ways. Lots of freedom for programers, for programs, for users….and it causes problems.

Whether it’s the kind of systematic freedom that allows a program to install a printer driver on your computer while also forcing you to install a recipe organizer, a photo editor, and a stamp collection, or alter your computer in subtle ways that breaks an important piece of completely unrelated software, or to run an unnecessary background process which eats up half your computers memory, Windows and Microsoft have always been big on giving developers whatever they want and letting the pieces fall where they may. This allows smart, and good, programmers to build some pretty remarkable things on the PC. It also allows the other 90% to write some pretty bad ones.

Apple is in many ways the exact opposite. They tightly control the operating system and the hardware. They only let the operating system work with specific hardware. It MIGHT work with something else if you jury rig a machine, but don’t count on it. They also highly restrict what programers can do within the system itself. For awhile they didn’t even tell people openly how to program on their Operating Systems, where the coding for Windows books filled shelves at bookstores, and in my basement.

Oh MFC programming, how I’ve totally forgotten you…Did I really once know C++? I think I’ve overwritten that part of my brain.

Anyway…fast forward to the world wide web and me talking about it on a blog…

When you present an application, or a website, to a user you need to think about what they’re going to do, and what you want them to do. You already make choices. Let’s say you put the logo in the top left, which is pretty damn standard these days. You don’t make it a movable layer to let the user move it anywhere they want. Why would you do that? What purpose could that solve?

I imagine myself in some office where a douchebag sales guy tries to explain how he likes to move the logo to the bottom left because that’s where it feels ‘real’ to him or something completely anecdotal and absurd.

Even if 1% of users feel that way, do they REALLY care if they can’t move that logo? Does it REALLY give them anything? Of course not. It’s pointless. However if 80% of users were to say they wouldn’t use the application because they couldn’t move the logo from the top right corner, I’d say “ok well…lets let them do that then.” Even if I didn’t fully understand why. I’d probably TRY to understand why.

Still that’s a dumb example. Nobody cares about that, so we don’t do it. The logo is fine in the top left, or top center, or whatever, and people are fine with that.

What about a more ‘current’ example?

I’ve been talking with CustomMade about restricting users to 10 listings within each of their Galleries. Each particular woodworker should only be allowed 10 listings to show up within a Gallery, though they can have as many as they want within their own user profile area, and they’d show up in search. The reason for this is to not let any one single woodworker ‘drown out’ all of them in the gallery by putting in 200 items. So how do we handle this, when we’re not currently handling it at all?

Well we could just restrict it in the SQL call we use to pull up the gallery listings. We could say ‘we’re gonna pull 10 random listings of yours and put them on the gallery page.’ It’d be easy, fast, the user would have no choices to make, and the problem would be solved. we’d be systematically solving the problem with no user involvement.

However, do most users want to CHOOSE which items they get to list? I haven’t surveyed them yet, but I’m willing to bet that they do want to. They don’t want a random sampling to show up, they want what they think are their 10 BEST items to show up. How we solve that then becomes about altering the user interface in some way, maybe even adding pages, and features, to let the user CONTROL what they’re showing.

Other times you simply don’t want to give users the option. For instance with text editing. CMS is great, as it allows people to quickly change a name or phone number, but way too often they include stuff that’s not really good to put in people’s hands.

Some people might change the fonts for some paragraphs or be overly fond of making things bold.

They might even use colors, and really go crazy, making what was once a refined user content contributed site, a pretty nasty looking thing, like Myspace.

Sometimes you just don’t want to give people those kind of choices. Other times…maybe you do. If you give people choices you need to both feel like those choices are NECESSARY in that without them you’re taking away a key piece of functionality the user demands, but at the same time you need to judge those demands and even if people want something, like colored text, it doesn’t mean that it’s smart to give it to them. They need to be QUALIFIED to use those features.

So design means making choices. It means determining what features and functionality are not only necessary for your application, but which you have users qualified to use them.

Which brings me to our product line. We’re specifically designing and developing odaycare, oclubhouse, ofitnessclub, and olawfirm with these concepts in mind. We want to provide the specific functionality the different users need, because a membership club needs different things than a daycare or a health club, but at the same time we want to provide those features in a way that is easy to use, and as restrictive as possible. We don’t believe in letting our users do whatever they want just because they want it. We believe in making applications that do things the way you’ll be happy with the outcome. We’ve spent time thinking about these products, and we’ve had numerous experts in their fields help us determine WHAT kinds of features and functionality are necessary, and they all have a ways to go, and we plan on continually updating and improving all of the products with new and cooler features.

We’re just not going to do everything. We’re going to do what’s necessary, and right, and the customers who use the products will thank us for it.