Comment by LukasMathis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LukasMathis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I didn't forget to mention the refund capability. I didn't mention it because it's not relevant to the point I'm making.

I'm not saying that Amazon is somehow trying to steal money from people (I rather like Amazon). I also didn't write a general critique of the Kindle's UI (which is usually quite well done). Instead, I merely pointed out a specific flaw with its UI. You can call this "whining", but I'm a UI designer, so being whiny about this stuff is kind of in my job description :-)

It's true that you can get a refund, but that doesn't make the problem go away. It means that the user can fix the problem once it has occurred. The experience is unpleasant regardless of whether the user can fix it afterwards. Preventing the problem from occurring is better than allowing users to fix it once it has occurred.

In my particular case, though, I was unable to fix it on my own. As soon as I realized that I had selected the wrong option, I hit "Home", hoping that it would cancel the action. It didn't cancel the action, but it did prevent me from seeing the order confirmation screen, which would have allowed me to cancel the order. Obviously, a quick message to Amazon fixed the problem regardless, but the point is that all of this should not have been necessary. It could have been avoided if the Kindle had simply selected the same default action for all types of documents.

I get that. However, when writing a blog post, it is good practice to consider what questions people will ask when they've finished reading it and answer them in the article. You have to admit, it's a pretty obvious omission.

I probably should have pointed it out. I've added a footnote.

Writing blog posts like these is a balancing act. On the one hand, I want to keep it short and stick to the point I'm making. The fact that you can get a refund is not directly related to the specific UI problem I'm describing, just like the "undo" feature in a desktop application isn't directly related to, say, mislabeled menu entries.

On the other hand, I try to write defensively. If an article is read by hundreds or thousands of people, there will inevitable be some people who feel that something they consider important was not included. I try to anticipate the most obvious criticisms or questions, and explicitly mention them preventively. But if I include all of them, the text will eventually become unreadable. I'm also writing for an audience of UI designers, who generally realize that I'm merely pointing out specific UI flaws, rather than making larger points about the products or companies I use as examples.

I probably missed the mark by not pointing out the fact that it's possible to get refunds, but I think it's not as obvious as you imply.

> It could have been avoided if the Kindle had simply selected the same default action for all types of documents

Why? Maybe they found that the vast majority of people that add a chapter wanted to buy the book, so they made it the focus.

The ONLY solution to the problem of accidentally order would be to require users to go through a multi-step process of confirming the order.

Apple does this with the iPhone, and it's annoying, frustrating, and promotes insecurity.

If you are going to make it as easy as possible to order, then you need to allow users to cancel the order. You can suggest that's bad user design, and maybe it is. But UI design isn't everything. User experience, of which UI design is just one part, is much more important.

>"Maybe they found that the vast majority of people that add a chapter wanted to buy the book, so they made it the focus."

Even assuming that most people wanted to buy the book when they opened a book sample's menu (which is unlikely, since you can't even see the book's price in that menu), this does not warrant changing the default selection from a non-destructive, repeatedly used action (for every other document type) to a "destructive" action (for book samples).

You just don't randomly change the order of menu items when people expect to see the same order, and you most certainly don't change the default action from something that is used often and is harmless to something that is potentially harmful.

>"The ONLY solution to the problem of accidentally order would be to require users to go through a multi-step process of confirming the order"

This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not between "make ordering the default action" and "make it absolutely impossible that people will ever order a book by accident." You can vastly improve the situation without solving every edge case.

The solution is simple: don't make buying the book the default action. If people have to consciously switch to a "buy book" menu entry, accidental book orders would very likely be cut down to a fraction of what they are now.

>"User experience, of which UI design is just one part, is much more important"

I don't see how the distinction is relevant in this context. Are you suggesting that accidentally ordering a book is a good user experience? :-)

> You just don't randomly change the order of menu items when people expect to see the same order, and you most certainly don't change the default action from something that is used often and is harmless to something that is potentially harmful.

You keep using the word random. I don't think you know what it means, as the ordering is not random. You can keep calling it that, but it's not. They aren't randomly changing anything. They are presenting, it seems, the most commonly used action as the default.

> You can vastly improve the situation without solving every edge case.

Have you considered that maybe your the edge case here? I'm not suggesting they have to make some concrete choice. I'm saying that the default choice should be the most commonly used choice for a scenario.

>I don't see how the distinction is relevant in this context. Are you suggesting that accidentally ordering a book is a good user experience? :-)

No, I'm saying that making it easy to do the common thing is better than solving for situations like yours: the rare, edge cases. For the average user, this could be a better user experience. For you, it isn't. Should they design for you, or for the average user?

>"You keep using the word random. I don't think you know what it means, as the ordering is not random."

The word "random" has more than one meaning. I'm using it in the colloquial sense of lacking context or being unexpected. I obviously don't mean that there is a random number generator switching up the position of the entries. Instead, I mean that to the user, the order is unpredictable or unexpected.

As for the rest of your comment, I would like to remind you that you are arguing for a user interface that replaces a benign default action with a destructive default action. It is, of course, possible that I am the only person who was affected by this. It's just not very likely. Simply asserting—without evidence—that most people won't encounter the problem is not a useful response when somebody points out a problem.

And again, I very much doubt that buying the book is the most commonly used action in that list, since, as I've pointed out, you can't actually see the price of the book when you're in that menu. Again, I acknowledge that I might theoretically be in the minority, but I tend to not buy things when I don't know how much they cost, and I suspect that most people behave similarly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com