More fun than frustrating

About 14 years ago, I wrote an article called "Learning by Dying." It was a response to a worried parent who was concerned about the kinds of games her kids were playing on the computer (this was in '95). I was writing, as I oft do, from the perspective of a play advocate. I wanted her to help her embrace her the relevance of fun, at least in her children's lives. What's been especially reassuring to me is that what I wrote in response is at least as relevant now as it was then, and not just to the nature of kids' computer games, but to some very fundamental principles of user interface. As the following from an article about the design of the iPhone so clearly describes:

"Any new system or gadget has a learning curve, but where the iPhone differs is that the nature of traversing that curve is more fun than frustrating. You swipe and pinch and tap and shake your way to familiarity instead of pressing awkward buttons and navigating byzantine menu structures. You learn the iPhone by playing with it, which encourages interaction because humans are built to play. Even in a system like this, we could quickly be dissuaded from doing so if wrong actions had negative consequences, such as getting online or sending messages accidentally. The iPhone is mostly devoid of these sorts of consequences. The only time I’ve run into this is repeatedly calling people I didn’t want to call while viewing my Recent Calls list.

"The iPhone goes further than encouraging play; it rewards play. If you explore the phone’s applications, you will often find them anticipating your needs. When viewing a video you’ve shot and press the action button, you can email it or upload it to YouTube. If you try to email it and the video is too large, it will ask if you want to send a smaller clip from the video instead of preventing you from sending it. The iPhone then presents you with the UI to trim a clip and continue with your message. The original video remains untouched. Simple, sensible, satisfying."

 Fred Brecher - The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: a New Direction for UX Design

via Bernie DeKoven, funsmith