When designing almost anything, there is a delicate balance between adding features and reducing complexity. The more features, the more complicated and harder to use the end product will generally be. The theoretical ideal design would be easy to use for the novice, but powerful enough for the most advanced user. This nearly impossible to achieve, and every program generally walks a balance between the two extremes of simple on one end, and powerful on the other.

I use the term freebie to denote those rare features that add functionality, but do not make the interface more cluttered or harder to use. They’re generally invisible until invoked. A keyboard shortcut is perhaps the most prominent example. They add very little to the user interface but provide a lot of power for the more advanced user.

Another example would be the two-finger scrolling on my MacBook Pro. Novice users can simply use the scroll-buttons in the GUI, while advanced users can scroll by simply dragging two fingers on the scroll-bar rather than one. Advanced gestures, which Apple has released on the MacBook Air, are even more of a freebie.

This does not mean that interface designers should simply hide their features. Even hidden, the best freebie still adds clutter to the documentation at the least, and can make the program unnecessarily complex even for the advanced users. The goal is to find those little extras that compliment what’s already there, or that provide a different way of doing the same task for users with different tastes.

Tags: Tech