Another glorious example of UI friction is Apple’s Front Row. If you are watching a video, to get back to the computer desktop you have to press the “Menu” button several times to navigate up the strict menu hierarchy.
Apple’s Front Row UI
Each button press requires that you wait for the cool animation to complete. Input is ignored while that is happening. You cannot queue up several button presses, and there is no short-cut to get to the top of the menu tree. You have to press the button, watch carefully for it to finish, press again and repeat.
It’s a tedious form-kills-function design. It’s not long before the form undermines itself and becomes not cool, just irritating. The experienced user cannot get faster through time and repetition — everyone must wait.
Once again, the advice for interaction designers is: give snappy response first, animate second. Do not let the latter get in the way of the first, and especially not for frequent tasks.
More can be said about UI friction and Front Row’s strictly hierarchical, iPod-like interface. Before you can get to feature B you have to do a lot of mode management overhead work to get out of feature A. Front Row’s Menu button is essentially a Back or Escape button. There is no Home button.
How might the strict hierarchy of Front Row and the iPod be done differently? Imagine if there were not just a mode-relative Back button but a global Home button. Also imagine menu choices that were always in the same place. Operations could then be reached deterministically — with the same sequence of key presses.
Determinism is a very valuable design requirement. It allows users to learn key sequences through repetition and get faster over time. (It also lets programmable remotes work reliably since they are not dependent on the starting state of the system. Every piece of consumer electronics should accept distinct On and Off commands and not just a “toggle power” command.)
We could go a step further. Top features could be accessed directly with separate, global Music, Video, Photos and DVD. Each would always be one button press away, guaranteed. (More buttons on the remote, yes, but that is the trade-off between true simplicity and merely the appearance of simplicity.)
The original Palm Pilot was wonderfully low-friction because of this simple idea. It had independent, global buttons for calendar, contacts, to-do’s and memos.
Globally accessible buttons on the original Palm
The PalmPilot always responded to these four hardware buttons. No state the device was in could override them, no app, no dialog box, not even the state of the device being off! It even had silk-screened buttons for four other most-frequent tasks: Applications (aka Home), Menu, Calculator, and Find.
Palm’s friction-busting approach is a great design to steal for anyone wanting to improve an overly modal consumer electronic product.
The dock on Mac OSX also suffers from UI friction. When the is set to “auto-hide” you can move the cursor to the screen’s edge to reveal it. Unfortunately it slides out when it appears, and not as snappily as you’d like. Switching apps is a high-frequency operation: the UI should be optimized for speed.