The problem with striptease

Striptease works because you want to see everything. It’s human nature, curiousity, lust, call it what you like. It’s incredibly engaging to have something slowly revealed, but it can also be frustrating. Especially when you’re being teased by a web app, as opposed to, say, something you’re actually interested in.

There is a new trend in UI design to use show and hide controls, ad nauseam, to “solve” design problems. It doesn’t work when you use it all the time. You have just two goals when you’re designing an application. Show the user what they need to see, and let them do what they need to do. Forcing a user to make those decisions is a bad way to design.

Decide vs show and hide

Here’s how it usually happens: Your client wants to display everything on a particular page, but as a designer you know it won’t work well. As Steven Wright says: “You can’t have everything, where would you put it?” You’re faced with three options. You can flick the switch, and just do what the client wants. You can work with the client to explain that it’s not going to work and look at alternatives. Or option three, you can include everything on the page, but hide parts of it, and let the client choose to show the pieces they want. That’s the best of both worlds, right?

Yeah. While you’re at it, let them arrange the page the way they like it, and pick their own color scheme too. Fuck it, why not give them a copy of Visio and see what they come up with from scratch, they’re probably more decisive than you.

From one comes many

In page preferences are preferences none the less. You should work towards killing as many as possible. Making components draggable or hideable is a poor substitute for studying users and seeing how the application is actually used. You might think it’s just one tiny widget with one line of text (Show more). But then that little widget usually sits in a column on its own, above a big empty space. Soon the empty space is packed with more widgets that someone might need, some day, possibly. Voila, Interface Fail.

ONE SOLUTION - ANALYSE

If you’re working on an interface that is riddled with in page preferences, it’s very useful to look at the statistics for what is shown and hidden. If you’re storing these preferences for users already, you can see the stats right in front of you. If not, I suggest using Google Analytics & virtual pageviews to find out what widgets are always shown, and what ones are always ignored.

You’ll be surprised how polarised the results are. You’ll be stripping down your screens right away, based on real usage data, not hunches. Redundant choices will die, interface components will disappear. This is a good thing. Remember the first rule of interface design…

No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it. — Alan Cooper