UI Design: a small rant

Nick Gaffney

Here's a short twitter thread featuring a video of a game designer discovering a way to use a Photoshop tool that was strangely very hidden:
https://twitter.com/cabel/status/1296213351479930880?s=21


It takes two minutes to watch, and is worth your time. Her reaction to realizing that the tool she absolutely needed was hidden away - mostly because of bad UI design - is one that I completely related to as an Altru user. Altru has so much functionality that seems just mindlessly hidden away from the user. Unless you specifically know about itt, there's nothing in the UI that seems remotely interested in helping the user discover it. An example:


- A new Altru user in my office did a search for a constituent. They didn't come up, so he added the person as a new entry. He searched again, but still nothing. Se he added the person again. Luckily, when his search came up empty again, he contacted me instead of creating a third duplicate.


Now, anyone reading this who is an experienced Altru user probably knows the answer to the problem he was having: in the search window, click "Show advanced search options" and make sure "Individual" is checked on. Easy fix, and now he knows it. BUT, why was this something he needed to know about in the first place? Why was "Individual" checked off in the first place? The search box shows fields for "Last Name", "First Name", etc. Why would he also need to know to tell Altru specifically the he was searching for an Individual when he was looking right at those fields?


Also, he's a new user. Why does he suddenly need to be clicking "Advanced Search options"? Altru's UI seemed to be actively mocking his desire to search, showing him everything he needed to do a search, but hiding the one checkbox he needed to actually make it happen. 


Now, it's easy to say: "well now he knows the answer. What's the big deal? He won't make that mistake again." But it wasn't his mistake. It was the mistake of the UI hiding what he needed to complete his task. And there are so many cases like that in altru. Functionality that seems hidden for no good reason. Whenever I show someone in my office how to do something in Altru, and the often multiple, unintuitive set of steps required for it to happen, there almost always comes a point where they look at me like I'm crazy, and I have to stop myself from defending Altru - "Well, if you think like a programmer or an engineer it's actually quite logical!"


Sure, I know how to do it, and I can teach it. But there's nothing intuitive about the steps; there's very little in the UI that points in the right direction. Sure, there are help boxes : e.g. a big orange button that reads "What type of Event do I need?" when creating a new event. But why is the word "Event" used to describe at least four different things? The big orange help box is essentially a band-aid over a much larger UI problem.


My $.02.