Click is as click does

How much of usability is context? Twice last week, I came across instances that illustrated the risk of allowing best practices to turn into heuristics.

First, a colleague sent me this piece of Nielson wisdom to help validate a design decision:

Error prevention – Jakob Nielsen: "Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action."

A common way of eliminating error-prone conditions is to disable command actions till the action is actually valid in a business sense. But does this work every time? Maybe disabling command buttons to prevent errors works really great on an installation wizard. Or for an online financial transaction. But say you apply it to a Login screen of a web application to eliminate common error-prone conditions. So, the Login Button is not enabled until the Username and Password fields are filled by the user. This certainly does prevent a few error scenarios. But does it make sense to the end user? I'd say it would surprise the typical user - the user enters the application login screen and sees that the one action that he wants to carry out is disabled – it is not common to see the Login button disabled, so instead of entering his credentials, he begins to wonder if there is something wrong with the application.

Here's another example:

'Don't make me Click', posted by Google Tech Talks on April 2. A snippet from the Abstract:

"What's made Google search, Facebook, the iPod, and Firefox household names? They all keep interaction to a minimum. The best presentation of content is the one which requires the least number of clicks and choices. Information overload is daunting: Few clicks and choices means more people stay and use your site. Avoiding interaction seduction allows you to create interfaces that are easier to learn and faster to use with surprisingly delightful interfaces."

The talk throws up several interesting ideas and Aza Raskin is a very good speaker. The line 'The best presentation of content is the one which requires the least…' from the abstract reinforces cult wisdom about minimizing clicks on any UI. But it speaks of usability independent of context. Usability can't be universal – you can work to arrive at what's potentially the 'best' interface for a specific context, for specific user groups with specific user goals.

When it comes to consumer web sites that try to cater to large audiences distributed across the globe, good experience gets defined basis a lot of research, prototyping and usability testing. I think that Facebook offers an excellent, compelling user experience to a certain demographic – technology savvy, literate web users in the 15-40 years age group. Maybe a different demographic finds the lack of clicks disconcerting – I don't know this, but it's likely to be dangerous to assume.

Bottom-line - I'm inclined to think that when it comes to usability, there are no rules, just learnings.