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This is an interesting principle which I understand the power of but feel is sometimes detrimental because it treats all surprises are equally bad. Surprises c
by ridaj 6y ago
This is an interesting principle which I understand the power of but feel is sometimes detrimental because it treats all surprises are equally bad.
Surprises can also be delightful. (It might be arguable that delight even requires surprise.)
That is perhaps the most extreme counterexample, but the point here is that we should treat very differently things that are "surprising, but easily recoverable" from things that are "surprising, and disorienting", "surprising, and makes you want to flip tables", or "surprising, and life-threatening".
Taken to an extreme, this principle leads you to stagnant designs, because you're afraid of modest innovations giving users a mild surprise. Or, your product fundamentally doesn't quite work the way most users expect it to work, so in order to avoid giving users a surprise, you do cosmetic things to paper over it...
Tldr: use at your own risk and remember you're at the wheel, not your principles
- lostcolony 6y ago"If a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it MAY be necessary to redesign the feature" - emphasis added. But, they're related, as you note. This is specifically referencing surprise in the sense of "What, no, that was not what I intended to do!", not in "Ha! That was exactly what I wanted to do; I can't believe it was that easy!" The reality is that latter is very, very rare in UI/UX (more commonly, successful actions don't even register to the user, even if it's slightly novel; it 'just works'). The former...very common, and a thing to avoid.
- loopz 6y agoThis comment, the other comments, and amount of article points, speaks Volumes about the current state of development. Principle of least astonishment (or equally: "principle of least surprise") should've been familiar to all Builders, but clearly it is not. Maybe the phrase or naming of convention is off mark, but it should really be self-explanatory, at least to creators: If what one intended, do not happen as intended, astonishment is always bad. We don't treat machines as Englightened beings after all, we expect them to perform exactly as specified. The work is, as has always been, imperative, in whatever form and shape. So, what should the phrase be, so that programmers might understand their ultimate objective end goal (and limitation)?
- kthejoker2 6y agoRaymond Loewy coined a phrase for this, wrote whole books about it Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/what-makes-things-cool/508772/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/what-ma...