Interaction Excise

Key ideas#

Goal-directed work vs. excise#

The book’s analogy is driving to work. Driving is the task that serves your goal. Opening the garage door, starting the engine, stopping at lights and refueling are excise. The car or external rules need them, not you, but you can’t avoid them. Out of habit, people stop noticing the difference.

In software, obvious excise includes installing applications, configuring systems and making backups. The authors’ advice is to hunt excise with enthusiasm and remove it wherever possible, since effort spent on it only lowers productivity and satisfaction.

Compare total excise, not visible excise#

Experienced command-line users often complain that moving and resizing windows is excise that typing a command avoids. That is true, but the command line carries heavier excise: you must learn and remember commands before you can do anything. A graphical interface lowers excise for occasional and new users through visual clarity. The lesson: compare the total burden, including memory and learning, not just the visible clicks.

Types of excise#

• Training wheels. Features that help beginners, such as wizards and step-by-step guides, become excise once the user is an everyday intermediate. They should be easy to switch off. The book’s image: don’t weld the training wheels onto the bike.
• Pure excise. Actions nobody needs, beginner or expert. The book’s example is asking the user to pick a hardware port that the program could detect itself. The only right fix is to remove the step and let the system do it automatically.
• Visual excise. The work of decoding the screen: finding an item in a list, figuring out where to start reading, telling active elements from decoration. Heavy visual metaphors belong here too, such as a telephone, copier or filing cabinet drawn on screen. They help on day one, then waste space restating what users already know.

Keep the balance#

When reducing excise, don’t simply shift it from one group to another. Optimizing only for experts hurts beginners, and loading all the excise onto experts for beginners’ sake frustrates the experts. Either imbalance leaves part of the audience unhappy.