Where are my pictures ?!

    A small observation from life on the topic of intuitive interfaces.



    My wife is a pharmacist. Life baggage - two entities (including higher) and a male programmer. The second suggests that it is generally insured against illiterate advice regarding computers. And most importantly - there is always the opportunity to ask and get an exhaustive answer if something is not clear. But the hitch lies in the fact that the "incomprehensible" is not a sign of bad (at least not always). This is absolutely normal. The incomprehensible just has to be supported by the opportunity to get an explanation. If we talk about ordinary desktop applications, then a hint or quick access to the corresponding section of the manual are quite normal ways to provide such an opportunity. And the husband-programmer is only one of these methods, and relatively universal :)

    So far, no facts, since the above was a small lyrical introduction. I wanted to talk about another stumbling block.

    Evil is hiding ... Point. Evil is hiding! When all actions are understandable to the user because of their obviousness, and the result does not meet the expected result, this most likely means that the content of the performed actions (the essence of the implementation) does not correspond to the user's expectations formed by your own view (i.e. the interface). Why does this happen at all? First, I will describe a fresh example from my life:

    In my professional activity, my wife uses a computer for two main purposes (I do not now take into account specialized industry-specific software tools, but on purpose I speak exclusively about common ones):
    • work with electronic correspondence (e-mail)
    • search and reading information on the Internet

    On the first point, everything seems to be in order. Since she perfectly understands the essence of her actions, and is not trained like any other office monkey, pressing buttons with hard-fixed images in her memory, she can freely use different email clients. A trifle? Maybe. But do not give up - read on and I hope I will be able to convey to you the degree of its significance.

    As regards paragraph two, circumstances so happened that she is engaged in the search for necessary articles at home (that is, where there is Internet access), and in reading - mainly at work (speaking “in Russian” offline). It seems to be doing pretty well with the search for the information she needs. But here is the article that will be needed tomorrow, when the client comes to find out why X and Y have different indications for use with the same composition of active substances. What needs to be done with the article from her point of view? Save her. And it is difficult to blame the user for the illogicality of its actions. And then she rewrites the saved pages to a USB flash drive, brings them to the pharmacy, opens ... Where are the pictures? Where did the pictures go? What the f *** but this Linux of his, he saved me a page without pictures! (Yes, my Linux is the classic culprit of all problems :)

    It is easy to guess that she only transferred the file with the html content to the USB flash drive, completely unaware that she needed a certain directory in which the images were separately saved. And she again cannot be blamed for wrong actions. Answer your question - what did she keep? The answer is a page. Not a file, not HTML. A page with all its contents. Those. exactly one (!) entity. So where did the need to rewrite any additional directories come from? Is it logical, intuitive? In my opinion - this is just complete nonsense. They hid from the user what they do not need to know. A laudable aspiration. But a poor implementation actually led to the deception (!) Of the user. He was misled and done it in silence, without giving the slightest opportunity to avoid undesirable consequences.

    Back to the email. Why is she not having any problems using various tools here? Because when working with each of them, it always remains in the field of applied concepts, such as a letter, addressee, folder, etc. Without going beyond the application area in this case, she has every right not to suspect the existence of files or directories in the file system at all.

    In the case of a saved page, she, as a user, was forced to switch from the concepts of the application area (such as a site, page or search engine query) to the file and directory level. And she could not cope with him, not only and not so much because she knew this level worse. And most of all, because the logic of this transition presented by the system (browser + OS) (perceived as an unambiguous correspondence "page-> file") turned out to be completely different.

    Thank God that at least someone at least once did something to fix this nonsense. And this attempt was called MHTML. But the result has not actually been achieved. For compatibility is lame on both legs.

    For firefox - see the appropriate section at: MHTML in Firefox .

    In Opera, there really is an appropriate option when saving. But even if the opera has the ability to save to mhtml format, the list of save options is as follows:
    - HTML file
    - HTML file with images
    - Web Archive (single file)
    - Text file
    Also, in general, far from the limit of perfection. Although this is already much closer to the category of "incomprehensible." But there is still work to do.

    There are several conclusions from the foregoing.
    1. One of the key indicators of the quality of a software system from the point of view of Usability is the clarity with which the boundaries of its application area are observed in its interface. A good example, clearly contrasting with the described page-saving example, is the ScrapBook extension for Mozilla Firefox . Another already voiced example is MUAs (Mail User Agents).
    2. If the system contains in one form or another a transition from its application area to some other information model (for example, a file system model) or vice versa, this transition should be thought out with exceptional care by the architect and designer.


    Criticizing, you say, is easy ... But I want to warn you, dear colleagues in the workshop, against similar design decisions with this small note.

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