Back in November I offered a tweet regarding a quote by Rory Sutherland, which went “The interface fundamentally determines the behavior”. This morning I lived the quote in a small way. Here’s what happened.
As is my standard practice, I play a little solitaire on the morning commute (by train) to just get my brain moving a little bit. Last night I left my iPhone at the office, so I used the solitaire game on my iPod instead.
The iPhone interface for this game is pretty great. Tap a card. Tap it’s destination. Done.
On the iPod, however, the interface is the scroll wheel and the center button. Scroll to the card you’d like to move (it scrolls in either direction through all the cards in the deck and on the table until you reach your destination). Tap the button to select. Scroll through all the cards between where you are and your destination. Tap the button again to drop the card.
Little habits form, like drop a card on the table and scroll really fast to the right to get back to the deck. But if you’re in the left column on the table, your trip would be much faster if you scroll in the opposite direction. Stuff like that. So, the interface is a bit cumbersome.
Normally, I can win a game before my 20 minute commute is over. It might take me 5-10 games to do it, but you can crank through a game really fast, abandon it once you know it’s a lost cause and start a new one without losing more than a few seconds. On the iPod, however, I could only manage to complete (abandon) one game and partially complete a second. The effect of the interface occurred to me when I realized I was thinking so much about being efficient in my use of the interface that I was making ill-advised moves.
So ends my completely anecdotal tale proving the wisdom of Rory Sutherland.