Paper Reading #7: Hard to use interfaces considered beneficial (some of the time)

Reference Information:

Title: Hard to use interfaces considered beneficial (some of the time)

Authors: Riche Yann, Riche Nathalie, Isenberg Petra and Bezerianos Anastasia.

CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Summary:

Researchers in HCI share a common understanding that ‘easy-to-use’, ‘easy-to-learn’ and ‘intuitive’ interfaces are beneficial to users. Designing such interfaces raises challenges and often requires multiple iterations. While the designers are generally prompted to discard more hard-to-use interfaces and smooth out usability issues, this paper talks about their potential benefits. The researchers observed potential benefits from introducing barriers for collaborating and communicating with others. The authors attempt to shed a new light on interfaces with usability problems and how these problems may benefit system efficiency and user experience. Authors state that that barriers in interfaces can benefit game play, learning, to guide users to improve their efficiency with advanced features, and more broadly the experience with a system.

Discussion:

In the experiment, the researchers purposely induced some barriers in the user interface and recorded the observations. They found that having some barriers and limiting communication can enhance the learning experience. Also, the users get a sense of achievement after they have learnt something after consistently trying. However, I don't quite share the same ideas. I think if the user finds an alternative more easy-to-use solution in the market, he/she will most likely buy that product. Users get easily frustrated since most people don't have enough patience. Overall, the authors did provide an interesting idea, but it wasn't very convincing for me.