Jason Terhorst

So, yesterday, my grandma wanted to watch an old movie (“Ghostbreakers”, starring Bob Hope) on my parents’ TV. She handed me this strange, antiquated technology called a “VHS tape”. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Okay, so I’ve used these things. Even had one in college. You insert the tape, and it plays. You also have to do this “rewind” ritual when you’re finished. But how hard could this be? So I stuck the tape into the player and powered on the TV. After two seconds, the tape was ejected without any obvious reason. There wasn’t another tape in the player, that much I knew. So what gives?

After two more tries, and a few “what the hell?” mutterings from me, I figured it out: the VCR was in an “off” state. But this wasn’t obvious to me at the time. My expectations were also different, due to my experiences with other players. This was a recent model, even including a built-in DVD recorder. But older, cheaper, and junkier players all did something this unit did not: when a tape was inserted while the power was off, the unit would assume that I wanted to play that tape. So they would power on, accept the tape, prep it, and play it. Since these older units could do it, why couldn’t a state-of-the-art 2007/2008 model do it? There’s no technical reason why not.

A few UI lessons:

1. Follow your user’s expectations and platform conventions: make sure your device offers an appropriate response to conventional user interaction. Even if it’s not quite the same reaction that they expect, do *something* – don’t just spit their input back at them and bark “no!”. For further example: if all standard Mac apps and most 3rd party apps respond to Command-H as “hide current application”, that’s what it should do for your application, too. Even if it changes the way *you* think it should work, you need to provide the user a way to make that command do what they expect – hide your app. Adobe, are you listening?

2. Provide consistent/clear feedback for modality and actions: why isn’t this working? It should have been more clear that the power was off, and that tapes can’t be played in this mode. Ejecting the tape doesn’t give me an explanation as to *why*, either. Similarly, if your device just beeps at me, is it obvious? Sometimes, better/more clear feedback would be more helpful to the user.

It drives me nuts when they don’t do user testing for these cases. Even if other manufacturers aren’t making the tape play automatically, don’t you want to do what you can to make the experience with your player more seamless and easy for your customers? If you do, then your customers will enjoy your player just a little bit more. That subconscious seed will be planted in their mind that, somehow, your product is better-build and just plain better than the others, and maybe they’ll buy your products again in the next purchase cycle.

Just something to think about.