Judging UI Design by the Number of Clicks

The dining hall here at college uses student ID cards as a form of payment.  When a student enters the cafeteria, the attendant swipes their card through a machine as if it was a credit card.  But the attendant has to do more than just swipe the card, they also have to tap two buttons on the screen of the computer.  I’m not sure exactly what the buttons do, but presumably something along the lines of “New Purchase,” “Student.”

This would not seem like a problem at first glance, but when you realize that 90% of the people eating in the dining hall are students, it becomes apparent that those two taps add a lot of work.  For every student that goes through, the attendant has to do three more actions then should be necessary.

Of course, most attendants get good at overcoming the problem.  Some leave one hand on the screen to hit the buttons, while swiping cards with the other hand.  Others tap the buttons with the card before swiping it.  But the point remains that the system is not well designed for its use.  To be efficient, the computer should automatically go to a new student purchase, which can be overridden by the cashier when someone else wishes to enter the cafeteria.

This observation reminded me of something on Daring Fireball a while back about user interface design: that UI quality is proportional to the number of actions the user has to take.  And this in turn reminded me of two common tasks at work that demonstrate frustrating UI design in an operating system.

For the first example, let’s look at the number of steps to connect to our campus wireless network:

On a Mac:

1. Click on the Airport icon
2. Select the network SSID
3. Type in username and password
4. Click OK

On a PC with XP:

1. Click on the Wireless Icon
2. Select “View Available Wireless Networks”
3. Select the network SSID
4. Click “Connect”
5. Click “Change Advanced Settings”
6. Click on the  “Wireless Networks” tab
7. Select the network SSID
8. Click “Properties”
9. Change authentication to “WPA”
10. Change encryption to “TKIP”
11. Click on the “Authentication” tab
12. Change “EAP Type” to “Protected EAP”
13. Uncheck “Authenticate as computer”
14. Click “Properties”
15. Click “Configure”
16. Uncheck “Use my Windows logon name”
17. Click OK
18. Click OK
19. Click OK
20. Click OK
21. Click on the notification that pops up
22. Type in username and password
23. Click OK

For our second example, let’s look at proxy settings.

On a Mac:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Go to Network Preferences
3. Select Airport
4. Select the Proxies tab
5. Select “Using an Automatic Configuration URL”
6. Type in the URL
7. Go to Built-in Ethernet
8. Select the Proxies tab
9. Select “Using an Automatic Configuration URL”
10. Type in the URL
11. Click “Apply Now”

On a PC:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Click on the Tools menu
3. Click on Internet Options
4. Select the Connections tab
5. Click “LAN Settings”
6. Check “Automatically Detect Settings”
7. Click OK
8. Click OK

As you can probably guess, I much prefer connecting to wireless on a Mac over a PC and generally prefer setting the proxies on a PC over a Mac.  Why?  Simply because of the number of clicks involved.  Especially when I’ve done each operation hundreds of times, I notice when something takes inordinately long to do.

So there does seem to be a correlation between the number of clicks and the quality of the satisfaction with the UI design.  We can see it in cafeteria cashier machines, wireless connections, and proxy settings.   I’m sure there’s a practical application to our daily lives here, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Tags: cafeteria, clicks, efficiency, proxy, user interface design, wireless