Usability, Drag-n-Drop and Douglas Adams

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

So far so great. The Page Builder application is starting to come together well. One of the things I thought I wanted to do was to have page elements (called page objects) such as titles, images, forms, etc available for the client to drag and drop around the screen. “This would be cool” I thought. People would enjoy the freedom of being able to move parts of their page around as they liked. Then I had a short chat with Stuart about UfindUs customer expectations and requirements, and I had a think about it in the car on the way home. Good place to think about stuff, long drive, little happens, pleasant scenery. Good place to learn Italian too, I hate wasted time.

A word from Mr Adams (again).

I like Douglas Adams writing. He wrote about technology a lot, and he had some really insightful views on it. One of the things he wrote was that mostly people just want ’stuff that works’ but instead end up with technology, and mostly they want their technology to be more like ’stuff that works’. The way to tell the difference between ’stuff that works’ and technology is that technology normally comes with a manual.

We started building Rapid Site to be ’stuff that works’, but it was in danger of turning into technology. With this in mind I think we’ll reign in the drag-n-drop interface for now (bit of a shame as it does look funky), and replace it with a simpler just-make-it-work interface. Less funky, but much more usable.