Efficiency

When I went to NAIT we had an interesting instructor for one of our classes.  He was supposed to be teaching us how to design interfaces for applications.  Since this was the day of the green screen his examples were all of mainframe based applications.  Looking at those screens brought some unpleasant feelings welling up from within.  It was the opinion of everyone in the class that the instructor "didn't get it".

Indeed his screens were overly complicated, cramped and just plain confusing, but he was convinced that you needed to design screens this way in order to be efficient.  Why the disconnect?

Some people confuse efficiency with the amount of information that they present to the user in a single screen.  The more "information" the more "efficient" the screen.  This is so wrong.  Studies have shown by keeping things simple people can comprehend what is going on faster and with a higher retention rate.  In the example that our instructor gave us he was trying to demonstrate what needed to be on a customer contact screen.  He had not only the basic customer demographics, but a recent contact list, dates and amounts of previous orders, recent changes to the account and payment history.  Some of this information was denoted in codes which the person looking at the screen was supposed to have memorized in advance.

Information overload is not efficiency.  For instance, if in the majority of cases the user just wants to look at demographic information, show just the demographic information.  Tailor the information that you present to match the circumstances for the screen.  Don't be afraid to add a tab or other item for the user to get more detailed information.  IF they need it you have provided a means for them to get it.  If they don't need it you wouldn't have wasted any time retrieving it.

The purpose is to allow someone to do the same job they are doing now more efficiently and sometimes that actually means less information, rather than more.