Simple is beautiful.

Part 4 of our 10 part series, 10 Things Every Developer Should Know About Design

Believe it or not, one of the fundamental goals of interface design starts with the Golden Rule. Luke 6:31: “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” Treat others the way you’d want to be treated.

Think about some frustrating things in life: traffic jams, calling customer support, waiting up for your teenage daughter to come home, doing ANYTHING with the insurance companies, doing ANYTHING with the government. Each of these situations have their own unique set of frustrations, but they are ALL compounded because of a lack of information. If you knew the traffic jam would clear up in 20 minutes, you’d still be frustrated at the waste of time, but at least then you could make phone calls saying you’d be late, perhaps get off an exit and take a different route. If your teenage daughter called and said the movie went long, you may still be frustrated with the fact she broke curfew, but at least you know what’s going on.

We all want to know what’s going on, and your users are no exception. The crazy thing is that Jesus’ words were actually in the context of loving your ENEMIES. Now some of you TREAT your users like enemies, but these are the people you’re trying to help! How much more should you treat your users with respect and courtesy.

Now I’ve got to spell this out explicitly because I’m afraid there are some developers who agree with this in theory, but don’t get it in practice.

Let’s talk examples. I’ve already mentioned the Wii remote’s subtle rumble when you hover over a letter. Good example. How about Twitter? When you’re typing in a tweet, there’s that handy Javascript-powered character count that lets you know when you’ve gone over 140. It even changes color as you approach the limit. That actually reminds of an example how NOT to provide feedback: Twitterrific. Instead of telling me I’m over letting me pare it down, it won’t even let me have more than 140 characters in the field at any given time, making editing a real nightmare. I much prefer Twitter’s grownup approach: hey, you’re over, if you submit it’s gonna get truncated.

Anyhow, back to the issue at hand. If you’re about to do something that’s going to take a while, let them know. Better yet, do it in the background. That’s one of the great things about AJAX. Instead of forcing the user to wait for the computer to work, AJAX lets it happen in the background while the user keeps working—Google Maps is a great example of this. Drag and it loads the images in the background while you’re busy looking at the map.

And be aware of the limitations of your technology. If you’ve got a blog on a slow server, put in a script that disables the comment post button once you click it and puts up a message that the comment is being processed. That way your user doesn’t keep clicking and wondering what’s happening.

See, that really is the point. With computers, a LOT of things can go wrong. There’s just so many small frustrations that people deal with: accidentally dragged your file to the wrong folder, an application quit unexpectedly, the website you tried to load didn’t come up, you misspelled a domain name, your monitor has a dead pixel, your webcam has a green line through it. So while your discourteous app may not seem like a big deal, you ultimately have the potential to add to your user’s happiness or take away from your user’s happiness.

And you can start making them happy by letting your users know what’s going on.