Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

Looking up some obscure bit of software setup, I googled around and found it in a blog post by the developer. I’ll just quote the beginning here:

As I’ve written previously, when OS X took over long-standing Photoshop shortcuts, it created a tricky situation: break Photoshop users’ habits/flow by changing PS to match the OS, or deviate from the new OS conventions?

The title of this post is one of those key tenets we operate on at Little Springs. We apply it to mobiles, but it’s really true everywhere. The vast majority of users, in the vast majority of situations, use a single device for all their work in a particular context. They switch applications a lot, but hardly ever change devices.

Sure, they switch from phone to desktop computer, but that’s such a change most people reset their brains pretty well to the marked differences. And some people in various regions swap SIMs all the time, and have night and weekend phones that are different from daytime phones. Even those, however, switch daily. They switch apps dozens of times an hour on each of those devices.

What this means is that your application should almost always use the OS-default behaviors. For mobiles, that’s putting softkeys in the correct locations (don’t flip them), making menus look like the device menus, supporting all gestures in the expected manner, and so on. This falls naturally into our avoidance of pixel perfect design. Use rules, and define a lot of the behavior as inherited from the device, instead of being always the same (looking at you now, Opera Mini for touch devices) or only being on one device, because of the “difficulty” of designing for multiple platforms.

Okay, I am sure the Adobe guys will argue that their tool is so heavily used that it’s practically a software workstation and therefore the tool should follow it’s own conventions. I’ve spent time in production environments, using Photoshop 10 hours a day and I say that those users exist, but are miniscule population, they still use their computers for other tasks (email, time tracking, file sharing systems, other Adobe apps with /different/ UI conventions), and anyway are going to invest the time in setup and training. Offer them a simple Photoshop/OS standards option if they want. The typical user should, by default with no extra work, get the OS-level defaults.

And a few others will argue this stifles creativity. I say “try harder.” There’s a LOT more interface and interaction room left around the edges to work in. If you just have to have something unique, pick an un-used command, gesture or corner of the screen and have fun with it.

I have installed fully eight browsers on my Android device, and almost all of them are pretty Android-ish, while also being pretty different. Often, weirdly so, with gestures and tilting and so on. But the core is something I am used to, which gives me some comfort zone to learn the application, and a point of departure for the new neat parts. And when it’s not (e.g. the Menu key doesn’t do anything) I get pretty lost.

To me, there is no tricky situation, because there is no choice: design for the OS conventions, even if they change, and break your existing design.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 10:26 am and is filed under Design, Design Tips, Gestures, Mobile applications, Strategy, Theory, UI Design Patterns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.