the case for the “fuck you” case

Those of us attempting to create a compelling user experience have to deal with a constant trade-off. A battle between efficacy and simplicity, between cramming everything our customers could ever possibly need onto a page and making it all obvious enough that they can actually work it.

I usually err on the side of simplicity. I’m no expert – but I like to think I’m following in the footsteps of those who are. There’s a reason I think simplicity always works, especially for developers. As we code, we’re trained to look for edge cases – what if the user clicks this, enters that but not the other thing, then uses the back button on their browser while doing star jumps? Its simple really – an edge case is actually another word for a bug, a combination of circumstance we haven’t anticipated. Being good programmers means we have to be on the lookout for potential edge cases, because it’s likely that they’ll turn into nasty bugs further down the track if we don’t.

But, as developers who care about how our customers feel about what we’re building, we need to train ourselves to do exactly the opposite. I know an incredibly talented interaction designer whose favourite reaction to our instinctual need to ask “what if” is:

Edge cases are programmer masturbation

And she’s right. But still, what if? How do we let our customers do the most stuff, but not be overwhelmed by a million options.

I think the answer lies in something we’ve adopted in development. Convention over configuration. Pick some sensible defaults, and if you really need that crazy, once-in-a-lifetime combination of Vitamin X, Y but most definitely not Z, well, there are gonna be some extra hoops to jump through. Fuck you (in the most friendly way possible, of course). There’s no need to swear, and hey, it’s certainly not like me to be unnecessarily antagonistic (those of you who know me, laugh now), but “fuck you” case is just so much catchier than that techy-sounding “configuration” stuff, and probably more likely to catch your favourite designer’s attention.

The best example of this off the top of my head is Mac OS X’s screen capture facility. You press Command + Shift + 4, you’re given a cursor with which to draw a rectangle around the section of pixels you want to keep and treasure forever, and when you release the mouse, boom, that’s it. No dialog asking you what file format to put the file in, or where to save it. No “what if I want to call that ‘pretty dog.jpg’?”. It’s just saved on your desktop as a PNG, and named sequentially. Mac users will recognise “Picture 1″, “Picture 2″, “Picture 3″.

And here’s the best part. I haven’t lost anything. I can still rename it, or change formats, or move it into my “cute puppies” folder. I’ll just have to do those things in another step. So the initial interaction is simpler, easier to work, and to top it off, the process is more flexible. Don’t be afraid of sensible defaults, or adding steps for the 5% of the time someone might want to something.

So do any of you have a good examples of this? Or perhaps an example of where it doesn’t work?