Interview - Jeff Johnson of GUI Bloopers

"As both a programmer and computer user, I felt strongly that computers should be easier to use than they were," says Jeff Johnson.

Hmmm... making computers easier to use, eh? Sounds like a great idea. But has Jeff succeeded in this goal -- one that he set himself while looking for employment after graduate school? SitePoint decided to ask Jeff a few questions to find out more about what exactly he has accomplished. After all, until now he has only chaired international conferences, worked for some of the leading companies in the world, authored and contributed to countless articles and books, and is now president of a product usability consulting firm he founded in 1996.

SitePoint: Hi Jeff, thanks for talking with us. I'd like to start off by asking you about how you first got involved with usability issues. What made you decide to get into this area?

In college (Yale) and grad school (Stanford), I studied cognitive psychology and computer science -- this combination is often called Cognitive Science. My interest then was devising computer models of how people reason and solve problems.

But as I neared the end of graduate school, I realized that job opportunities in cognitive science were limited. However, there were significant opportunities in the field of human-computer interaction. This was in the late 1970s, when the micro-computer (also known as the personal computer) industry was just getting started. Computer and telecommunications companies were recruiting people who had the sort of background I had, to help make their computer systems easier to use.

As both a programmer and a computer user, I felt strongly that computers should be easier to use than they were. That feeling, combined with ample job opportunities, lured me into the user interface field.

I went to work in 1978 for a small microcomputer company in Silicon Valley called Cromemco. It had been founded a few years before by two Stanford electrical engineering grad students. They needed someone to design easy-to-use software applications and oversee the usability of hardware components such as keyboards. Because Cromemco had a very small programming staff, I had to be both designer and programmer for many projects. I designed word-processing, statistical, and graphics software for them.

Then, in the mid-1980's I left Cromemco to work at Xerox. I didn't work in their famous Palo Alto Research Center, but rather in the Office Systems Division, which was charged with turning PARC technology into products. I worked on successors to Xerox's groundbreaking but unsuccessful Star workstation. As at Cromemco, my role was as a user-interface designer and implementer.

After a few years at the "University of Xerox", I moved on to research positions at US West (a phone company, now called Qwest Communications), and then Hewlett-Packard Labs. Soon after HP Labs dismantled its human-computer interaction research group in 1992, I moved to a secret spin-off of Sun Microsystems called "FirstPerson".

FirstPerson was Sun's attempt to expand its business beyond computers into electronic consumer appliances. FirstPerson's founders had developed a new language called "Oak" (now Java). I was the main usability guy: I helped design prototypes and test them on real people. The prototypes were things like TV set-top boxes, online video-on-demand services, that kind of thing. We weren't even allowed to talk to other Sun employees about what we were doing. Soon after FirstPerson became JavaSoft, I left to form my own consulting firm, UI Wizards.

SP: Do you value user knowledge of the software over usability? Does this knowledge increase the usability of a product over time?

Human beings are very adaptable: they can learn a lot when they're motivated. The question is: when are they motivated? I don't think every software product has to be so easy that all of its functionality is instantly accessible. Violins and automobiles take serious effort to learn to use. Some people learn them; others struggle. But people who learn them love what they can do.

When people use software in a workplace, they often don't choose it. It's given to them to use, as a requirement of their job, and they're therefore motivated to learn to use it. If it takes a little time to master, that's probably OK. But remember: the employer bought the software to improve employee productivity. If the software takes forever to learn, is highly error-prone, or it's just tedious or painful to use, productivity suffers. So employers as well as employees have reasons to want software to support, rather than get in the way of, the real work.

Software for the home is a different story. Here, there's almost no motivation to learn. If you can't figure something out quickly, you'll abandon it pretty fast. Web users are even less tolerant of services that are hard to use. Why struggle, when there are several dozen (or several hundred) other sites offering the same thing for less hassle? We'll just hit "Back" and go somewhere else.

With regards to knowledge affecting software usability, studies have shown that when people say they "use" a software product, this actually means they know how to use only a small fraction of that software's total functionality. Once most people learn enough to accomplish their goals, they stick with that and rarely bother to learn much more. For example, almost no one uses Microsoft Word's stylesheets facility. Most people leave all paragraphs "Normal" and set the fonts, margins, and other formatting directly.