The New Interface Advocate

I was in one of Roger Grice’s HCI courses here at RPI last week, and he showed us the “interface of the day,” which was an online simulation of an Etch A Sketch (Etch A Sketch is a trademark of the Ohio Art Company). His point was about the faithfulness it had to the classic Etch A Sketch experience despite being merely a flash application, but I think the original itself is more interesting.

When I have asked acquaintances to think back to when they last used an Etch A Sketch, no on yet has relayed feelings of limitation and frustration with the toy. However, most interface designers would offer a list of violated principles of usability were they shown the design of an Etch A Sketch without having ever seen it before.

The controls are unintuitive; each knob controls an independent axis of movement, but why should the rotation of one move the drawing point up while an identical manipulation of the other moves it right? Even after convincing oneself that the knobs’ respective domains of motion correspond to a particular pair of rotations, the system seems to fight every attempt at controlled, planned movement. Diagonals necessitate careful consideration before starting lest an all-too-easy direction error send the little line veering off in the wrong direction, and curves? Rare indeed are those who can draw so much as a circle, let alone handle the subtlety of anything harder. Practice with an Etch A Sketch seems to yield meager advance in skill at best, despite hours hunched over that little red-framed gray canvas. As a consequence, “art” made on the Etch a Sketch is invariably of amateurish—almost infantile—quality. Yet, it has enjoyed wild popularity and still entertains countless consumers every year. How can an interface so obviously and pervasively flawed accomplish this feat?

The interface suggests several reasons for its appeal:

1. Perhaps the sheer novelty of interface (which it owes to the seeming absurdity of its design) trumps the efficacy thereof.
2. Maybe the art is merely a byproduct—an excuse for exploring the controls themselves.
3. Perhaps the difficulty of the interface presents a challenge to users that they enjoy trying to overcome.
4. There is considerable appeal to knowing that one’s work is immune to judgment. The unreasonable investment required for even mild proficiency mean that everyone is handicapped to the same near-beginner level, so most users produce yield very comparable results.

What might these reveal about the broader field of HCI?

With the first possibility, Interface Architects might get a free pass on cutting-edge designs allowing them to make some pretty comprehensively flawed designs and still have them widely enjoyed and accepted on the strength the novelty alone. Obviously, this is both true and false in the marketplace. Most designs that are flawed are crucified immediately or at least accepted only over energetic protests, though sometimes a design gets away with what amounts to murder in the HCI world—like the Dock.  (In the linked article Tog provides an excellent overview of just a few of the major flaws in the Dock.)  Novelty then, probably isn’t the entire answer. However, this does highlight the value of an appealing interface for crafting a positive user experience in spite of other factors, even fundamental usability issues. Perhaps sacrificing even efficacy or usefulness on the altar of interest, aesthetics, or novelty can bring a net increase in user enjoyment. Obviously, giving up as little as possible in any of those areas is ideal, but when choosing among them, it seems any one could be the key ideal to seek.

In the second possibility, the entire purpose of the Etch A Sketch is just to twiddle knobs and the art is nothing more than a side effect, or, at best, an excuse. In addition to being unsatisfying, this explanation cannot account for the existence of dedicated Etch A Sketch artists or that children will proudly show their artistic Etch A Sketch work. Unless these groups experience it fundamentally differently than everyone else, this isn’t enough to resolve the main question.

The idea of interface-as-purpose isn’t useless, though. Consider the Wii’s Mii (character) creator. Its ostensible purpose is to make characters. In spite of this, many Wii owners barely register that purpose. Imagine that several friends gather to play a game on a new Wii. First, they decide to make their own Miis. Though an efficient system based on photos and good algorithms might be able to build the characters in a matter of moments, the Wii requires some careful selections and a fair time investment.  Surprisingly, the group doesn’t mind; they really enjoy the process, stretching it out far longer than necessary by playing with silly changes and debating one pair of eyes versus another. By the time all the characters are created, the purpose (making their respective likenesses) is almost forgotten and certainly no longer the real reason for using the Mii creator at the next gathering. I even know a young woman who constantly created Miis for people she knew, often deleting them before even showing anyone else.

The third possibility is that fighting the Etch A Sketch interface is the interesting part of the device. This is something of a variation of the second idea. It seems to entail a slightly different experience, though. Instead of just enjoying the journey of using the interface, it presents a challenge akin to a game of skill. Is there any way a tool for daily activity could integrate challenges to entertain users and sooth monotony?  Would visibly impeding anything more important than an erasable line-drawing be universally frustrating experience? Could an escape-hatch overcome the frustration with hindered critical tasks, or would it cheapen or destroy the challenge?

The fourth explanation for the Etch A Sketch interface’s appeal is the idea of lowered expectations for the end product. Because few people ever devote the enormous time needed to master an Etch A Sketch, everyone else can be confident that their results will be respectably similar quality to anyone else who might see them. Immunity from judgment has a powerful appeal to people. In an age of Photoshop/GIMP and Inkscape/Illustrator, I have seen many people draw crude (frankly, quite unattractive) images drawn MS Paint in the same amount of time as a clean design could have been produced in one of the aforementioned packages (Photoshop and Illustrator are trademarks of Adobe Systems. GIMP and Inkscape are trademarks of their respective authors.  MS Paint is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.).  Why settle?  Often, the reason is because an offhand remark that “I only had paint on the computer I was using,” attributes the flaws to a limiting tool instead of a personal lack of talent or experience.

As Interface Designers/Architects we should be sensitive to the possibility that designs that grow with the user, provide great power, or otherwise expose differing levels of expertise, experience, and talent might cause beginning users embarrassment or even discourage them from trying to develop new skills because of the relatively deep mastery they witness around them.  Of course, this is an extraordinarily difficult problem to deal with, but an awareness of it provides a significant first step.

In the end, perhaps no single one of these appeals gives the Etch A Sketch its enjoyability; the fun comes from a sublime combination of all of them.  Taken individually, they are a fascinating exploration of appealing designs that should violate the very premises of HCI.  Together, they’re a really fun toy.