Please Ask

In my last post, I said we should stop asking users so many questions, but sometimes we don't have information we really need to do what users want.

Case in point: I love voice dialing on my BlackBerry. I can make phone calls without looking at the screen. Voice dialing is one reason why I won't get an iPhone anytime soon. But, several times, my BlackBerry has called the wrong person. It's called Andrew and Andrea instead of Audrey, Dale instead of Neil, and Bernie instead of Roberta. In each case, the last names were different but began with the same syllable, so maybe that points to a flaw in their voice recognition algorithm.

But, you know what? I don't care about that -- I just want it to work. And I actually know why it fails. I have almost 400 people in my address book and the voice recognition is optimized for a far smaller number, with much less overlap between possible names. I don't want to take people out of my address book just to make the voice recognition work better -- I have people I email regularly but never call and vice versa. I don't call my kids' teachers and I almost never email my mom. I want them all in my address book and I don't want to have to omit information either.

I'm a technical guy, so I fixed it in a technical way -- I marked all the people I actually might want to call and I programmatically fixed all of the other people so that their phone numbers are in the Notes field instead of the Phone fields. Now, I can't call them by mistake, but I still have their phone numbers if I need them. But, yesterday, somebody who I hadn't talked to in a year called and, instead of their name, I just saw a ten-digit number. And the voice recognition can still get it wrong and then tell me there's no number for the person I wasn't planning to call anyway. That's not what I want either.

Until (and unless) the voice recognition gets a lot better, there ought to be a better solution. Let me mark the people that I might want to call (or not call). Or let me have two address books. Or take frequency into account. I've called my wife like a zillion times and I call her soundalikes rarely if ever. You'd think it would know that.

As I said, we shouldn't ask users questions that we know the answers to. Or that we have a better idea of what the right answer is than they do. Or that we can figure out based on watching their actions.

But, if certain information about the user can make a big difference in the quality of what we provide them (and we can't get it in other ways, such as observation), we should ask.

Don't Ask!

We need to stop asking users so many questions. To put it simply, every question that we ask users is a question that we couldn't answer during development. Every option in the Preferences dialog box is a question that we couldn't answer. When we ask a user a question that they don't understand or that they don't know how to answer, it's an opportunity for them to leave. At a minimum, they'll be frustrated.

In general, the fewer questions we ask users, the better off they are.

The problem is quantity.

Have you ever looked at the Options dialog in Microsoft Outlook? (I'm using Outlook 2003). In the Options dialog and in the numerous subdialogs reachable from it, there are well over 200 different options that you can set. They have 80 icons! Do they seriously think that anybody is going to look through and set all of those options?

It's not like Outlook is alone. The Options dialog in Microsoft Word 2003 has even more (though they managed to do it with just 3 icons).

Exercise for the reader: Check out the Options/Settings/Preferences dialog in your favorite applications. Give yourself bonus points for every application with more than 100 options. Double bonus points for applications with more than 200 options.

No, the problem is quality.

The problem isn't just quantity -- there are so many inexplicable options it's hard to pick which examples I want to use. We have the ones that don't explain what they actually mean, like Word's "Allow fast saves" option (nah, I like my word processor slow), those that use terms that have no meaning, like Outlook's "Read all standard mail in plain text" (gee, I thought all my mail was standard, except for the spam, of course).

I have friends who won't order in a restaurant until they find a mistake on the menu. They've never been unable to order. If you made a rule that you couldn't use an application until you found one option that you didn't understand, I daresay there wouldn't be a single application you'd have to avoid.

Do the right thing.

I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't ask any questions and that we shouldn't have any user preferences. But, whenever we're tempted to put something in preferences, we should really ask ourselves if we can figure out what the right thing is. If we can, we should just do it. And if the item really is a matter of taste -- a personal preference that the user might have for how we do something -- then, and only then, we should ask the user.