UI comparison - when talking about personal preferences just doesn't make sense
I'm planning on taking a little time to do an in-depth comparison of the Android and iPhone UIs some time in the near future. Before that, I want to say a word about subjectivity and UI "goodness".
When I talk about one UI being better than another, I often hear back things like, "I prefer it this way." Before I go into a whole lot of detail on reviewing these UIs, I just have to point out that this response is totally irrelevant. How you feel about a UI is not the same as how good a UI is. And when I say that one UI is better than another, I'm not expressing my personal attraction to it. I'm evaluating how well it serves all people.
Here's a metaphor. You and I are present at the beginning of the world, and we have to choose a single domestic animal that will be the only available pet in the new world we are creating. Much like a UI, we're going to have to make a decision for other people, and they won't have the option of meaningfully changing it in the future. Let's say that we're limiting our choices to cats and pigs.
So we do all the user studies and things come back ambiguous (or we just don't know how to interpret the results, which I think is a far more common problem). In the end, you and I as designers are going to have to make a decision about which pet would be preferable. That's why they pay us the big bucks. In a sense, this is very similar to a UI decision about what font to use or the size of the padding, the interaction model, or any number of other aspects of a system. While discussing it, I present my case: cats are cute, they are furry, they've been shown to have a mild positive impact on their owners' life span and stress levels. They are relatively low on maintenance and expense, not too fragile, and they are clean. They purr. They would make a better pet species, I claim, than pigs, which are better for eating.
You shoot back with, "But I prefer pigs." It's not hard to see how irrelevant that is. We're not discussing our personal preferences. We're trying to divine and shape the way our world will be experienced by its users. (And it's especially irrelevant if you are an engineer, because your personal preferences in technical matters are probably a lot further from normal people than you realize.) Although there's no scientific proof of this, I think there's a lot of evidence that a world with pigs as the only allowable pet would not be as good as a world with only cats.
So when I talk about one UI being better, it's true that that's open to debate. And it's possible that my taste is the one that is broken and that other people have better ideas about which UIs will most please our customers. But if you are still embracing the idea that no one is right, that everyone is entitled to their opinions and that no one way is better than another, then you and I are working toward different goals. I'm trying to create a UI that people will love and that will grow my business. You are just fiddling around.
