The importance of labels: Usability work at microsoft
Jensen Harris (working on Office 12) has written about using labels to aid the understanding of icons.
Part of the user experience effort around Outlook 98 was improving the menu and toolbar structure. One of the problems noticed again and again among non-expert users was that people didn’t use the toolbar at all! With the exception of the “Delete” icon (which was perhaps familiar from the Windows 95 shell), people used the menus to reply, forward, and to create new messages.
Different fixes were tried: new icons, rearrangement of the icons, positioning icons under the menus from which the commands came from. In the end, one change caused a total turnaround: labeling the important toolbar buttons. Almost immediately, the toolbars were a big hit and everyone at all skill levels starting using them.
Toolbars: Outlook 97 vs. Outlook 2003.It’s not really any big surprise if you think about it. It’s pretty rare in the real world that we rely on iconography alone to represent ideas. Bathroom doors generally have an icon of a man and the word “Men.” Stop signs have the word “Stop” on them. On the other hand, I can recount dozens of experiences where the icon-only design of something has frustrated me.
On a recent vacation, we spent probably 10 minutes trying to figure out how to turn an oven on before just giving up because we couldn’t tell what any of the icons meant. I have buttons in my car that I have no idea what they do because the icon is so cryptic. I guess I could look them up in the manual…
This is really interesting stuff. To be honest, I have made this mistake often. I remember one occasion where I was sceptic about just showing icons (no labels). The graphical design company convinced me that when using a web application every day, the users would know the icons. In retrospect, I should have been more stubborn.
I think Jensen makes a good point here. And backs it up with data collected in Microsoft office. It’s really good to see that Microsoft does something about the user interfaces to make it better, easier to use, faster, more effective to work with. One of my favorite usability examples when working with web applications are from Windows and Office.
Remember Windows NT? When i pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL to logon I had to type in my password AND username. I kept asking myself why do i have to type in my username? I just restarted the computer, it already has my username? Windows 2000 changed it and saves the username of the last session.
Maybe they did it for security reasons? Does that make Windows NT more secure than, say Win XP? I think it’s an example of colliding usability and security interests. And a perfect example of how to solve it.
Technorati tags: usability microsoft office security labels icons
November 15th, 2005 at 23:04 (GMT-1)
Yes it is always an interesting (a.k.a. hair-pulling) experience when security and usability collide. Besides usability security is also one my big passions. Personally I think that the username in some circumstances should be guarded just as well as the password since for instance a skilled social engineer easily can get a long way just knowing a user ID.
As you so correctly put it Windows 2000 remembers the username that last successfully logged in and pre-fills it into the username field at the next boot. Windows XP (if not in a domain) by default goes one step further and displays a nice list of all the usernames available on the computer.
If you are a security buff you can disable this “insecure” behavior though. If you own a Windows XP you can enable the more traditional “Ctrl-Alt-Del” logon dialog. I’ve also found a FAQ page on how to prevent the last logged-on user name from being displayed. It is written for Windows 2000, but if you own a Windows XP that is in a domain or you have disabled the standard graphical list of usernames (as described above), this FAQ should apply as well.