You may or may not be familiar with the concept of tropes; according to the website devoted to such things, www.tvtropes.org, Tropes are “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” In other words, tropes give viewers a reference point – some sort of familiarity within a story that the viewers can relate to, which underpin the rest of the story’s more explorative elements.
Web sites and apps also use conventions to root the user in tried-and-tested, familiar surroundings; enhancing and streamlining the user-experience; re-calling stored and understood data from the memory banks to minimize the amount of cognitive overload when digesting new information.
Introducing new conventions
As the web is still in its relative infancy, new conventions are being created all the time. Consider iPad apps, such as Twitter, where you drag the timeline down to refresh with up-to-date entries – thanks to its intuitive nature, this was quickly proven successful and became a standard UX element for touch devices.
Even the dusty old floppy disk icon for saving files was once a brand new convention that was quickly adopted by UX designers back in the day (although they were probably called something much less cool back then). As with many conventions, a previously understood metaphor was used for transferring a user’s understanding from a traditional environment to a digital one.
Speed is not always the end-goal
Sometimes conventions are artificially inserted, in order to make an interface match the user’s expectations. Loaders are a perfect example, whereby users are so accustomed to seeing their actions greeted with a ‘thinking’ response from the machine that faster loading times may negate the need for a dedicated loading graphic; therefore, they may be artificially displayed for a short time to reassure the user.
A similar concept is the page turn transition in iBooks. Calling on a real-life metaphor, it uses a very visual example of reassuring the user that they’re moving to the next page of content – eschewing the worry of slowing down the experience for instead encouraging familiarity and understanding.
So, conventions can enhance a user’s experience of a website or app, but is this always the case?
There’s an argument that in certain specific cases where information-retrieval is not the primary goal, that bucking the trend can lead to more exploration making the experience more engaging and immersive. As ever, the key is to understand your users and their goals, and build an experience that’s appropriate to them. We’re not quite talking Mystery Meat Navigation here, but
if the user is expecting that a degree of exploration will be a key element of their visit, they’ll happily persevere without the usual pointers; as long as the experience is intuitive, there should be no frustration on their behalf and, as mentioned above, new conventions may even be created.
The gulf of expectation
The upshot is, whether conventions are followed or flouted, the interface must be intuitive enough to retain the user’s attention. What happens when a user completes a command must closely resemble what that user was expecting to happen, also known as the gulf of expectation. According to the Godfather (aka Jakob Neilsen), most usability problems come from a mismatch between a user’s mental model and the application they are using, so ensure there are no nasty surprises and your users will love you for it.
