Review on article “What You See is What You Use”
The article What You See is What You Use attempts to tell us about the power of visibility and the disadvantages of hiding the options/features through hamburger menu
The author has explained about the difference between making things visible directly and hiding things and hoping users will use it, in a very unique manner by the example of roof deck and the back yard patio. The author says by her own experience how much she used the roof deck and the Patio simply because of the fact that the Patio was in her sight and the roof deck was out of her sight and tries to apply the same thing for user interfaces. According to Julie Zhuo(The author) its more about ease of access than making people look for it when it comes to features and options.
She has demonstrated these phenomena by giving examples of Facebook's old hamburger menu and the new tab bar layout.
Here the author has related the Facebook’s hamburger menu to roof deck and the patio to new tab bar layout. The author is trying to explain that we designers love our minimalism, our white space. We love the elegant nooks and crannies where we can hide all our numerous features and options. Behind menus. In drawers. After a long-press or a swipe.
Out of curiosity I tried different UI with and without hamburger menu, to my surprise I found, the one that had more visibility of features/options were more easy to use, so I went and experimented on a set of other users just to know how users will go about it, majority of the users said they found access to information easier in UI where there was more visibility of features/options.
Even though the hamburger menu allows us to keep things simple, eliminate information overload, and facilitate direct access.I feel the disadvantage of the Hamburger menu is, even if users are aware of the feature/option, it forces the users to first open the menu before allowing them to reach their goal or achieve their objective. Users tend to use more of features/options which are more visible and in their sight and tend to subconsciously forget about things which are out of their sight
The author has a concrete data to support her views as she tries to explain it on different situations, namely
· One entry point
· On menus
· On giving people options
· On contextual actions
· On leveraging existing channels
Another way to think about this is to relate it with is by the following example, as an international student I faced this in Starbucks in the states, I was new to Starbucks and I ordered cafe mocha and the waiter gave a cup of cafe mocha, when tasted I was not satisfied with the taste,
(keeping the reputation of star bucks in mind)I thought maybe 2 out of 10 times due to some reasons it doesn’t taste good, so next time when i went and ordered the same coffee again, i didn’t like the taste of it, then i stopped going to Starbucks. One fine day one of my friend who is an American invited me to star bucks, I refused saying, I don’t like it there and explained my earlier experience with Starbucks, my friend laughed and said, they have n number of combinations in cafe mocha and asked whether I have tried all of them? To my knowledge I dint know that other combinations even existed in Starbucks, so that’s like hidden information, it isn’t put out openly in Starbucks(at least at the place I visited), so as a new user I dint even know about the existence of the hidden info, so after that, i tried their different combinations and started liking it.
So here the different combinations feature with cafe mocha is hidden and not visible for new customers.
The conclusion we can draw from this is, to try and adapt to a design layout where it clearly shows users the important features/options rather than hiding it through the hamburger menu or any other means for that matter.
As the author has pointed out
