[Sigia-l] RE: Re: IA and semiotics - and standards?

[Jonathan Bieley]

In a coincidence, Wired just ran a story about the "perfect" version of 
Microsoft Word, version 5.1 for the Mac:

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,63848,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

And while I think fighting bloatware is good in its own right, I think the 
article points out a significant issue rarely discussed in IA: switching cost 
to a new UI. I mean, who are *we* to fight an allocation of funds for a 
shiny, spiffy, and of course improved interface for any project?! But should 
some interfaces, even when poor, be maintained because of user acceptance?

Is the fact that I keep looking for the Format Document menu from Word 5.1 in 
my Office 2000 the fault of the scenarios developed at Microsoft? My sense of 
what to look for in a word processor was shaped - dare I say imprinted - 
during the time that I used Word 5.1. It's no longer about cognitive models, 
etc., it is more like what people call a muscle memory - I know I want to 
change the margins and I go to the middle of the menu bar with my mouse and 
it should just be there.... Heck, I am hesitant to switch to a newer cell 
phone (which I already own) because the existing physical and software 
interfaces are so familiar. 

So, while Gunnar suggests a 'fear of a future denied' as a driver for feature 
neophilia, I think that there may also be a compensatory neophobia about 
being lost amid the inner mental chaos caused by new features (and their 
arrangement in a UI).

Practically, how many people have worked on a project and agreed to keep a 
previous poor UI and only introduce fixes gradually? (While this is a visual 
design, I am thinking of the eBay background color shift as an example.) Have 
folks considered backward compatibility in new interfaces or just 
compensating by getting the client to allocate time to training? I think that 
the thesaurus folks are used to this through the use of related and 
specifically preferred terms. Looks like Microsoft did this when they allowed 
a UI to revert to the 5.1 UI. Any other examples?


Jon Bieley