Friday, September 5, 2008

Incremental Changes vs. Large Changes to UI

What is the correct level of granularity for changes to a user interface or policy? A price increase to subscription fees may best be done slowly, and a price decrease done quickly to make it more dramatic. But a UI change can have significant and startling effects. Users habituate their UI behavior. A link with a name change, such as having a link to a subsite with automotive content in 12 point font change to a link for an express general sales format, may divert folks unexpectedly who have habituated clicking on the automotive link.

I saw a site which made a change so that it moved it's "donate money" box and button to the part of the page where the mouse would be on the previous page clicked through. Remarkably effective, I did donate! The box was moved directly, not incrementally.

Users sometimes complain about incremental changes when they can't aggregate because of it. An example is policy changes every few months requiring changes to submitted content. If a change requires a change to user behavior to accommodate it, such as needing to remove email addresses from pages, and then a later policy change to require elimination of JS, then larger, infrequent changes may be more appropriate.

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