Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 29, 2007:
Generic Commands
Summary:
Applications can give users access to a richer feature set by using the same few commands to achieve many related functions.
In application design, there's a tension between power and simplicity: Users want the ability to get a lot done, but they don't want to take the time to learn lots of complicated features.
- One way to address this dilemma is to use progressive disclosure — that is, to show users only the most important options until they ask for the advanced features.
- Another good approach is to use generic commands, which remain the same across many different contexts and thus reduce complexity.
Cut, Copy, Paste
The cut-copy-paste triad offers the most famous example of generic commands. These 3 basic commands suffice to let users do everything from move text to edit movies. In fact, because they work across so many applications, I view them as "super-generic commands."The first guidelines for generic commands are:
- If at all applicable to your domain, your application should support the super-generic commands that people expect and know from other applications.
- In particular, provide cut-copy-paste commands for moving stuff around.
The cut-copy-paste triad wasn't the original generic editing command set. The original designers at Xerox PARC used move-copy-delete. If you think about it, these two triads both map to all common user actions, they just do it in different ways:
| User Action | Cut-Copy-Paste Model | Move-Copy-Delete Model |
|---|---|---|
| Remove stuff | Cut (with no subsequent Paste) | Delete |
| Insert stuff in a new location while removing it from the old location | Cut, followed by Paste | Move |
| Insert stuff in a new location while leaving it intact at the original location | Copy, followed by Paste | Copy |
From the above table, it might seem that move-copy-delete is the superior set of generic commands. In practice, however, it forces you to specify where you're copying or moving to and from. Having 2 arguments per command complicates matters. In contrast, cut-copy-paste employs an intermediate state: the clipboard, which is a different complication but allows each command to proceed with only 1 argument.
It's hard to say which of the two models is superior. But it's clearly best to pick one model and stick to it everywhere. Much confusion would ensue if people had to use one model half the time and another model the other half of the time.
Benefits of Generic Commands
Generic commands have three advantages:- They are ubiquitous, so users will expect to find them (and will look for the commands without being prompted to do so).
- They are consistent, so users will know how to use them.
- They replace many commands that are more specialized, so users have less to learn.
Consistency doesn't require that generic commands work identically across different contexts — just that users perceive that they do so. For example: cutting a piece of an image using a graphics editor typically leaves a blank area on the canvas, while cutting words using a word processor closes up the remaining text without leaving a gap.
You could expose these different operations by using separate user interface commands — such as cut picture and cut words — but doing so would add unnecessary complexity. Yes, when users issue a cut command in the two contexts, different subroutines execute, but it's better to hide this difference and create the user illusion that a single command performs these similar operations.
On the Web, a simple example of a generic website command is "go to the homepage." Often, sites support this command using a logo in the page's upper left corner that links to the homepage. Unfortunately, not all sites do this, which seriously reduces usability for the Web as a whole.
Currently, the only generic Web commands that truly work are those in browsers rather than on individual sites. Examples include Back, Forward, and Print. In the latter case, it would be much more useful if the generic Print button subsumed a page's Printer-friendly version feature; clicking Print should print a printer-friendly view, not the view on the screen. You can implement this improved user interface by providing two CSS style sheets for the page: one for displaying on the screen and one for printing.
Three iPod Touch applications, shown in both vertical and horizontal tablet orientations.