If It Isn’t Broken, Don’t Fix It

Confusion Around New File-Saving Paradigms

While Auto Save was a welcome addition to the applications that came bundled with OS X Lion such as TextEdit and Preview, it was coupled with another controversial design change: changing the Save command to Save a Version, which let a user save a different version of a saved document at any time, and removing the Save As command from the File menu, replacing it with Duplicate. Rather than letting a user either save a file under a different name or save it in a different place or both as Save As had, Duplicate creates a copy of a file, placing it the same place as the original, then lets a user change its name, as shown in Figures 4 and 5.

At least, in this case, Apple realized its mistake. Though the company does not appear to have learned well enough from prior mistakes how best to correct such mistakes. In OS X version 10.8, Mountain Lion, the File menu has again morphed into something unfamiliar. This time into a proliferation of commands—Duplicate, Rename, and Move To—for which Save As alone used to suffice, as shown in Figure 6. Both the Save and Rename commands display a Save As dialog box, shown in Figure 7. Thus, the behavior of Save is inconsistent with that of the traditional Save command. The Move To command displays the rather useless dialog box shown in Figure 8. If a user clicks Other at the very bottom of the Where drop-down list box, shown in Figure 9, a Save As dialog box appears.

Fortunately, most other major software developers didn’t jump on Apple’s design bandwagon and have retained the Mac’s traditional Save and Save As commands on the File menu, shown in Figure 10.

Sadly, Apple has made many more design missteps since Steve Jobs became ill, then resigned from his position as CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011. His vision and attention to detail are sorely missed.

Adobe Creative Suite 6: Damage to Dreamweaver

In making a too-long-overdue effort to bring more consistency to interactions in the applications in Creative Suite 6 for Mac, Adobe decided to bring Photoshop’s user interface into greater conformance with that of Illustrator, disrupting the user experience for people who are primarily Photoshop users. In my opinion, Adobe should have realized it was past the point of no return and left well enough alone.

On the other hand, in CS6, Adobe has again almost completely neglected to make any improvements to Dreamweaver. Most of the changes that I’ve noticed are actually bugs that got introduced in CS6—for example:

• Dreamweaver no longer remembers the window layout that I prefer to use or applies it to all documents that I create or open, and its defaults are exactly what I would not want. So, every time I create a Web document or open one that I haven’t opened recently, I have to do either of the following:
  
  • Click the Layout icon on the window title bar to display the Layout menu, then click Code and Design to display a split-screen view. Click Split Vertically to deselect it, and finally, click Design View on Top to deselect it, as shown in Figure 11. That’s four clicks times how many ever documents I open—a lot of clicks that I didn’t have to make when Dreamweaver remembered the settings that I always use.
  • Alternatively, click View on the menu bar, then click Code and Design on the menu. Click View on the menu bar, then click Split Vertically to deselect it. Click View on the menu bar, then click Design View on Top to deselect it. That’s six clicks for every document!
• It’s no longer possible to specify a title for a link that I create using the Hyperlink dialog box. Yes, the field is still there, but if I specify a title, the link doesn’t get created at all! So I have to write the title code manually for each link.
• Dreamweaver no longer allows me to find and replace strings of extra spaces that get introduced into the HTML code in text that I’ve copied from Word, then pasted into a Web document. (In the Mac version of Dreamweaver, there is no import feature for Word documents as there is in the Windows version. And content from Word documents that were originally created on a PC don’t come across well. In addition to throwing in lots of extra spaces in the HTML code, it omits most paragraph tags and uses line breaks instead.) So, if I want my HTML code to be tidy, I have to select each instance manually, then cut it.

How Adobe managed to introduce so many bugs into Dreamweaver without making any improvements to the application is a mystery to me.

Google Gone Wrong

Some examples of design changes that Google has made recently that have not been well received by users include the following:

• Google Search—It’s very disconcerting to have the search box whipped away from it’s traditional location—centered on the page—to the upper-left corner of the page as soon as a user starts typing a search string. And the search page loads much more slowly than it used to, introducing a very noticeable delay before a user can even start typing a search string. Between the unnecessary animation to move the search box and displaying the search results on the same page, this is now a much heavier page. While displaying the search results on the same page is a desirable feature, this could have been done with more finesse.
• Google Maps—Until recently, Google Maps was a joy to use, and its user interface had evolved coherently throughout the addition of many powerful new features. But the most recent version of the Google Maps Web application combines seemingly arbitrary layout changes—very little is where it used to be or is in the same location both on the desktop and on an iPad in landscape view; minimalism that has run amok, resulting in a more difficult to decipher user interface; unstable behaviors; cryptic icons; and poor assumptions regarding what users would want to do next result in a user interface that no longer meets users’ needs as well as it once did. Do its designers really think users would generally want to immediately zoom in on their destination rather than get an overview of their route first? That considered, was it really a good idea to minimalize the zoom feature for the desktop Web application, making zooming a much more laborious process?

In Conclusion

Examples of bad design changes that have degraded the usability of software user interfaces are far too numerous. Software companies used to do a much better job of serving their users’ needs than they do today. Of course, there’s room for improvement in just about any software user interface, and applications that evolve gracefully continually provide greater value to users. But, all too often, design changes lead to user frustration. For example, when users’ kinesthetic memory makes them reach for a control in a particular location on a screen and it’s not there anymore, this frustrates users and reduces their efficiency.

When redesigning software, the key to great design is first distinguishing between what’s working well for users and what isn’t; then preserving the good—an,d in some cases, just the familiar—remedying the problems, adding new features without detracting from existing features, and delivering a coherent, holistic design solution.