The User, The Expectation, and The Control

Starring as the user we have world reknown Bob, and co-starring along his side are the expectation and the control. Bob plays your average Internet user browsing a website and would like to fulfill the task of finding the location of an office and visit the office. The expectation and the control are weird characters who can work together to help Bob but sometimes find themselves arguing who is right and who should lead Bob.

View the image below before you continue reading this entry.

button action expectation

Remember Bob was trying to find an office location? Well, he’s on the right track and now all he has to do is view a clearer image rather than a small blurred thumbnail. So what does Bob do? He clicks the ‘View Larger Image’ button and loads a larger version of the image to view. Bob now decides if he wants to print the map out.

In this scenario, the expectation and the control worked flawlessly in allowing Bob to view a larger image in the same browser and gave him a choice of printing the file or to return back to the webpage he was browsing.

Let’s say Bob has a laptop and he’d like to save the map into his computer. He decides he doesn’t want to save the image file because it won’t be clear when he tries zooming it. Bob decides that saving the PDF version of the map would most likely better suit his requirements. When Bob clicked the ‘Download PDF version’ button, the PDF is rendered and viewed directly on his browser using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Now the scenario becomes a little ugly. The expectation told Bob after clicking the button, it will automatically provide him the option to save the PDF file into his computer. The control on the other hand had teachers called usability and accessibility. Both of them taught the control to leave last decisions to be made by the user.

So following what its teachers taught it, the control only told Bob what he could do after he clicked the button.

I personally feel the expectation came before the control and psychologically speaking, the interpretation of ‘Download PDF version’ should’ve been understood. Nevertheless, Hawk said that the control is correct because no matter what the end user should be given the last decision and control of their browser. Also he said, “though no matter what you do.. you are technically downloading the pdf.”

Do you think ‘the expectation‘ or ‘the control‘ is right in the task of Bob who wanted to save a copy of the map into his computer?

Posted by Danny Foo on July 27, 2006 | Filed Under Website Lessons | Bookmark and Share |

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