Etude and the folklore of user interface design

Abstract

Research in user interface design is like the weather—everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. While this isn't strictly true, the great majority of guidelines for user interface design that one is likely to come across are based on the experience or gut feelings of a particular designer. These are better than nothing, but they are made less useful since 1) a particular recommendation could be based on factors unique to the designer's own system, 2) the population for whom the particular system is intended is either not described in detail or is not a generalizable sample of computer users, 3) designers' gut feelings are notoriously inaccurate sources for human factors guidelines. Thus the main body of recommendations available to the designer of a new system is more in the category of folklore than of readily accepted engineering principles. So long as one recognizes these limitations, it is still very helpful to consider the recommendations one finds in the literature when designing a new system. Some of these are based on experimental evidence, while others are repeated often enough and with so little opposition that their utility is better than average. In this paper, I will show how these principles have been applied in designing the Etude text processing system. After summarizing the major ideas behind the design of Etude, I will focus on several specific areas of user interface design, comparing Etude's approach with the appropriate recommendations from the folklore. I will conclude by briefly describing a forthcoming experiment which is intended to determine if adherence to the folklore has in fact produced a system that is easy to use.