About this site's lack of design: Yes, it's supposed to look this way — I'm helping create a new sandbox theme for WordPress (see it on GitHub).

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

|

More Noise Is Better

Last week I was watch­ing a Ger­man tele­vi­sion show (they actu­ally do have worth­while pro­gram­ming at times) which inves­ti­gated and tested noise lev­els of house­hold appli­ances such as vac­uum clean­ers, dish wash­ers and kitchen robots, among oth­ers. Gen­er­ally I would con­clude that the less noise these var­i­ous machines made the bet­ter. Yet, user research indi­cated that a vac­uum cleaner, for instance, which made less noise was per­ceived as less pow­er­ful and there­fore less effec­tive. Odd, is it not?

Towards the end the research con­cluded that some prod­uct char­ac­ter­is­tics are so fun­da­men­tal to the (pos­i­tive) value assigned by users that remov­ing (or reduc­ing) them will trans­late into a neg­a­tively affected per­cep­tion. There is an inter­est­ing line to be drawn to design and usabil­ity. How­ever the ques­tion remains how this would apply to user inter­faces and web design in gen­eral. I’m still try­ing to see what role user expec­ta­tion, accus­tomed­ness and per­cep­tion play and how some assump­tions design­ers make can have an oppo­site effect. Can you think of any analo­gies sim­i­lar to the vac­uum cleaner case, but applied to user inter­faces or web design?

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Monday, February 16th, 2004.

Categories:

You can follow comments on this item via the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments are closed.

3 comments on “More Noise Is Better”

  1. Posted by Jonathan Hicks on Monday, February 16th, 2004.

    Absolutely. I’m col­lob­o­rat­ing with a group of web devel­op­ers, who have designed (in my view) an excel­lent site for them­selves. Its very min­i­mal, but well laid out, with white­space in the right areas, atten­tion to lead­ing etc. For peo­ple who claimed not to be design­ers, I think they’ve sur­passed themselves.

    How­ever, their client feed­back has all been the same. Rather than prais­ing its clar­ity and read­i­bil­ity its “too white, not enough imagery or colour, not enough ‘going on’ “. The per­cep­tion was that very lit­tle time or money had been spent on it. Shame!

  2. Posted by Ste on Monday, February 16th, 2004.

    I think “good design” to some extent is a gen­er­a­tional thing. What many pro­fes­sion­als see as good design (good use of white space and typog­ra­phy with images used spar­ingly for effect and to add mean­ing), oth­ers see as overly sim­plis­tic. At times this can become quite frus­trat­ing. (I’ve had bosses that want to see more “move­ment and excite­ment” on home­pages that already felt to me clut­tered and busy.) Oddly, my own mother some­times prefers ama­teur­ish web­sites sim­ply because they have cute ani­mated gifs or pho­tos of kit­tens. Some­times I won­der if the whole of my design edu­ca­tion should have focused more on imple­ment­ing pho­tos of kit­tens into every­thing I create …

  3. Posted by Sam Royama on Monday, February 16th, 2004.

    One fac­tor I think might play a sig­nif­i­cant role in this area of design is the amount of overt thought a user gives to any par­tic­u­lar design. If a user is asked or made to think about the inter­face they are using, then they may “per­ceive” more prob­lems than there actu­ally are.

    Users noticed the lack of noise given by a vac­uum cleaner. The cue gives the users an oppor­tu­nity to say “Hey, why is my vac­uum so quiet?” One assumed answer is “not very powerful”.

    So this begs the ques­tion: is good design invis­i­ble or trans­par­ent? If the user never has to ques­tion the inter­face, per­haps it is doing its job — allow­ing the user to inter­act with the prod­uct effortlessly.