Brilliant Interface!
No, not a web site, or an application or a component. I’m talking about a dental tool!
I was at the dentist today, and while he took a break to find a bigger drill or something, I was looking over the tools on the tray beside my head. There was this one that’s kind of like a probe for measuring the depth of cavities or gum pockets or something. It’s almost needle-like and has notches in it to measure from 0 to 10 millimeters.
Think about how you might design such a tool to make it easy to read. Now, if you were to just throw 10 notches on there, that would be pretty unusable. Remember, the thing is slightly thicker than a needle, and only a centimeter long. It’s going to be in the back of some guys’ mouth at an odd angle, with questionable lighting and you’re going to be wearing safety goggles. You don’t want to be squinting and trying to count those little lines.
Obviously the first thing you want to do is make line 5 stand out some how. At least you know the halfway mark, and you only have to count one way or the other. But how to make it stand out? Make it thicker? There’s not a whole lot of room for that, and I don’t know that it’s really going to be that easy to see under the circumstances. Coloring is no good. These things are solid stainless surgical steel, heat and chemical sterilized a couple of times a day. Maybe some have paint on them, but I didn’t see any.
The problem is it’s too crowded already. You can’t really add something to it, but you can take something away. Here’s the solution:
See what they did? They removed notches 4 and 6. I just imagined using this thing and it was obvious that no matter what the measurement was, you’d be able to see it instantly, with no counting little lines. No squinting and trying to see if that was four or five lines. No wondering whether or not that line was the center line or not. After a day of working with it, you’d see the measurement without thinking about it.
It goes back to something I remember reading about the human mind being able to instantly recognize groups of one, two, three and sometimes four. Beyond that, it gets harder and you usually have to count, or break the group down into smaller groups. Like when I see 5 things, I mentally break it down to two and three and know that’s five. That’s why when we are ticking things off, we make four ticks and then the fifth one goes through them. The design of the proble totally follows that.
So what’s the point you ask. I don’t know. I guess I just had too much time in the dentist chair to think about it. No, wait, there is a point. Interface design. It just inspired me to come up with elegant solutions like this when I’m coding something someone will need to use. And here’s a clear case where removing something from the design made it 100 times better. And what was removed? Something you’d normally consider untouchable, a vital part of what the thing is and does – a measurement mark on a measuring tool. I’m definitely going to have to keep this in mind the next time I build an interface.