Charles Sheehan-Miles

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Why interface design is so important

I’m finally finished doing the layout and design of Cincinnatus Press’ newest book, B.E.F. The Whole Story of the Bonus Army.  The book was originally printed in 1932, and is a must read for anyone who follows veterans issues: written by one of the key organizers of the 1932 bonus march, it chronicles the story of the bonus marchers as they crossed the country on their way to Washington, the summer spent lobbying Congress, and their final expulsion from DC at the hands of the U.S. Army.

What does this have to do with interface design?  Well, the authoritative place to go when you are registering new titles in print is Bowkerlink.com, because Bowker is the authorized manager of the US ISBN agency.  If you want to be listed in Books In Print, you have to go there.  And my conclusion, after dealing with their terribly designed and nonfunctional system, is that no system at all is probably better than a badly designed one.

The issue I’m struggling with is that in adding three different versions of the same book (hardcover, trade paperback and ebook), somehow their system managed to munge two of them so I now have to editions of the book with the same ISBN number.  That’s a problem, because it will screw up ordering systems, etc.  This is pretty basic functionality – generally when you design a database that has a column which should countain unique records – which ISBN’s are supposed to be – you simply make the column a primary key and program some logic which prevents anyone from accidentally entering a duplicate.  I’m not sure at what point in the process I ended up with the duplicate, but I do know that it’s a big problem.

I’ve written their tech support, and hopefully it should be relatively simple to resolve (we shall see) but it raises an issue I’ve been struggling with a lot lately as I get the beta of ActiveCharity.org up and running.  I’m no expert when it comes to interface design.  In face, my experience is that the interfaces I do design tend to be frustrating, difficult to use, generally a big headache.  Kind of like using Bowker’s ISBN logbook application.  So I’ve spent weeks (actually months) extra on the programming, trying to do everything I could to simplify, streamline, and make the application as self-explanatory as possible.

Where possible, I’m trying to use Apple as an inspiration. Say what you will about Apple as a company or OS X as an operating system, if there’s one thing those guys know how to do, it’s program an interface that works.  The iPhone in particular has such a simple interface that when I checked one out at the Apple Store recently, it literally took about 30 seconds to figure out how to use almost all of the device.  Unlike my current phone, a Windows Mobile device that routinely gives me fits, has to be reset three times a day, and misses calls on top of all that.

So I spent some time reading about interface design, trying to identify what works and what doesn’t.  Then I spent some time studying my Mac and how the best programs seem to flow.  Then I started putting it together.  Will it work?  

We shall see.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to donate an iPhone so I can get a closer review and therefore improve my programming skills, please feel free.

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