158 Chapter 8: Process Flow
My (Bill’s) blog site was recently spammed. It turns out that my 100 or so articles all had 4 or more spam comments. That means that I had to delete more than 400 spam comments. Given the way Google Blogger implemented comment deleting, I had to follow these steps for each comment on each blog article: 1. Scroll to find the offending comment. 2. Click the trash icon to delete the comment. 3. After page refreshes, click the “Remove Forever” checkbox. 4. Click the “Delete Comment” button. 5. After the page refreshes, click the link to return to my blog article. 6. Repeat steps 1–5 for each article with spam comments. It took 1,600 clicks, 1,200 page refreshes, 400 scroll operations, and several hours to finally rid myself of all of the spam comments. If the delete action could have been completed in the same page as the comments, that would have eliminated hundreds of clicks and well over a thousand page refreshes, and scrolling would have been all but eliminated. I would not have wasted all the mental energy to reorient myself after each page transition. And I would have been a much happier man. This is a common interaction flow on the Web. It turns out to be simpler to design and implement a process as a series of pages rather than a single interactive space.
The Magic Principle Alan Cooper discusses a wonderful technique for getting away from a technology-driven approach and discovering the underlying mental model of the user. He calls it the “magic principle.”* Ask the question, “What if when trying to complete a task the user could invoke some magic?” For example, let’s look at the problem of taking and sharing photos. The process for this task breaks down like this: • Take pictures with a digital camera. • Sometime later, upload the photos to a photo site like Flickr. This involves: — Finding the cable. — Starting iTunes. — Importing all photos.
* Discussed in his “Interaction Design Practicum” course, found at http://www.cooper.com/services/training/ ixd_practicum.html.