Sound familiar?
So, I was just listening to @jmathias on the EE Podcast, where — among other things — James talked about Pixel & Tonic’s Assets add-on for ExpressionEngine. He applauded the add-on, but one of the remarks he made was that he thought it is “inherently wrong to mimic Finder” because it is “unfamiliar to a large portion of users”.
I must admit, I am an OS X user and I haven’t yet taken a look at Assets, but I can say this. Lack of familiarity does not mean bad UX. It just means unfamiliar. If you take the two extreme positions, you could make a file interface either like Windows Explorer or Mac OS X Finder. Choosing either of the two will exclude the other, so no good choice could be made, according to that stance. Trying to come up with something entirely new is very difficult indeed and will very certainly be unfamiliar to all of your users. And this idea is true for any kind of interface, not just a file manager.
To conclude, I think it’s wrong to dismiss an interface/design/UX, just because it’s unfamiliar to a certain portion of your users. It most definitely is not “inherently wrong”. It’s a matter of how easy it is to get familiar with the interface, not how familiar you already are. If an interface “just works”, familiarity is irrelevant. Plus, do not dismiss the joy of working with a piece of software. If OS X wasn’t such a joy to work with, I never would have switched from Windows to Mac, despite the fact that I was unfamiliar with Finder the first time I worked on a Mac.
Comments
It’ll be interesting to see what Mathias’ influence on EE’s UI is going to be. I can only say, on a recent EE site that handles loads of files I switched over the entire build to Assets in an afternoon. IMO it’s a massive improvement over EE’s clunky file manager and user feedback has been very positive as well.
Amen. :-)