I was working on a portlet design with my partner on the project who we'll call Joe. Both the width and height of the portlet was fixed. Problem is, it needed to display multiple nuggets of tabbed-out text and each nugget could easily include more text than could fit in the space allotted.
What to do.
Two issues: how to present the overflow and how should its presentation be triggered.
My thought was a fly-out containing all the text that was triggered when the user moused over any part of the truncated text body.
Joe liked the fly-out but not the way I suggested it be triggered. He was convinced the user needed a mechansim, a trigger which enabled him or her to conciously choose to see all of the content. He felt that mousing over the text body was too easy a way for the user to mistakenly pop this fly-out even if he/she didn't mean to and that this could be an intrusive, disturbing and annoying paradigm that could cause users to reject the portlet and that was the last thing we wanted.
His thought was a text link at the end of the truncated text that read ... more.
If I hadn't been so thrilled to be working with a UX professional who wasn't suggesting we make the text in the portlet scrollable ( any UI/UX designer worth their salt knows that the idea of scrolling within a scrollable area, i.e. portlet on a Web-page, is generally retarded ), I might have made the following two points: First, that if the user's cursor is anywhere near that portlet, they're going to want to see everything it's got to tell them by definition and that the tabs were far enough away from the text as to render accidental fly-out firing a matter purely of easily-acquired user expertise. Second, that easier is quicker. Users had a lot to do while using this page and would always be on the phone with a customer in the course of using it. Users had to get in to this screen, get what they needed and then quickly move on. I felt that the milliseconds of time it took for the user to steer their cursor over some fussy little link the size of a grain of rice could be better spent elsewhere. If all you really need is for your user to just throw a ball, why require them to throw a strike?
But Joe was sharp as a tack, had a degree in human factors and maybe he knew something I didn't. Plus he was a full-timer showing me the ropes and I was a contractor on the job for only three weeks. Part of what he might have been doing was devising a design he could sell to our stake-holders. In the end, our disagreement over this small point wasn't the important part of this lesson learned anyway.
"Idea integrity" was.
We took one half of an idea and sewed it to another without considering the leftovers.
During user testing with our prototype, when users moused over the more link, they were expecting to see only that content that was previously unavailable, not the whole thing. They had to take a moment to adjust to the idea that what they were seeing in the fly-out was the portion they had already seen, together with the unseen.
Jarring and weird.
My fly-out was inspired by the ghostly pale-yellow tool-tip-like fields that tend to wax and wane over long links and other globs of truncated text in the Windows environment on mouseover. In this paradigm, one need only mouse over the truncated text, not pull a trigger somewhere. Joe's 'more' link was inspired by the kind of thing one sees at the end of a paragraph on a particularly long Web-page that is designed to shoot you to the rest of its content. The former promises totality, the latter promises continuation. We had connected two incompatile ideas in an unholy union and now it was chasing us around the laboratory bent on strangling us both.
We eventually evolved the solution into something we think will be embraced, but the lesson ties back to so much of what goes wrong in UI design: Bastardized ideas floating around without the context from whence they sprang. A good argument for rigorous user testing because it would otherwise never have become apparent to everyone. In my own defense, I had my doubts going in.
So when you find yourself podging a solution together out of parts of other ideas, don't be surprised if the villagers have the following reaction ...
