Second Law of the Interface: Interfaces are not transparent

Interfaces are something more than just a tool or an instrument designed to accomplish a task. Interfaces are interaction environments where different human and technological actors maintain different kinds of relationships (First Law). The distance between a tool and an environment should be clear to the reader: a tool is used while an environment is lived.

The best interface disappears

When we drive a car we pay attention to the traffic and the road signals and not to the gearshift, the accelerator or the brake pedals. If we concentrate on these devices, we’ll probably run over a pedestrian. Remember Don Norman: ‘I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job’. The world of digital interactions does not escape this dynamic: in this precise moment my mind is thinking in the sentence I’m writing and not in the keyboard. The dream of every designer is to create transparent interfaces. This is the logical consequence of considering the interface as a tool (First Law). However, what’s good for the designer and especially for the user it is not necessarily good for the researcher. The disappearance of the interface is the utopia of every interface designer, but it is the nightmare of the interface theoretician.

The apparent transparency of interfaces

Even the simplest example of interaction — such as clicking on a button to turn the light on or transferring a document to the trash — hides an intricate network of interpretative negotiations and cognitive processes between the actors involved in the interchange. The interface, like any other place where sense production and interpretation processes take place, is never neutral or transparent. Like reading a book or watching a movie, the interaction is an interpretation game.

Umberto Eco (1979) believes that a text – a novel, a movie, a picture – is the place where two strategies confront each other: the author’s strategy and the reader’s strategy. Mutatis mutandis, we can say the interface is the place where two strategies challenge each other: the designer’s strategy and the user’s strategy (Ninth Law).

Proposals, contracts and grammars of interaction

It could be said that every interface presents an interaction proposal that the user can accept or not. This contractual relationship between designers and users challenges the hypothesis of the interface transparency of the interaction. When we enter a new videogame, software or website, we explore the surface of the user interface and interpret it. First, we identify interactive and non-interactive elements; second, we try to identify their functions and the possible consequences of interacting with them: ¿What’s this icon for? ¿What happens if we click on it? In brief: the interface engages in a dialogue with the user. Or better, the user makes the interface speak, explores it, reconstructs its code and interprets it while interacting (Scolari, 2001, 2009).

But interfaces never do what the designers expect them to do. A system designed for receiving messages can be used for creating virtual communities, and a digital animation software can be turned into a platform for multimedia production. The users co-design the interface and use it in their own way, even over-interpreting it, frustrating the intentions of the designers, who try to dominate the process and make the user do what they want.

In this context the user can accept or not the interaction proposal of the interface. If it is accepted, them the user will establish an interaction contract with the interface. This contract is like the ‘suspension of disbelief’ identified by the theorists of literature (Coleridge, 1817): when the interaction contract is signed the user accepts the rules and cooperates with the interface, making it work.

Now, after the interaction proposal and the interaction contract, let me introduce you to the interaction grammar. What is grammar? It is a series of rules and principles that governs the creation of meaning in verbal and non-verbal languages. User interfaces must have a grammar to regulate the interchanges with the users. In 1984 Macintosh popularized a series of principles that were later incorporated into the rest of the computer user interfaces. For example:

• One click > Select element
• Double click > Open the element
• Drag’n’drop > Move element

This grammar has remained the same for more than twenty years, at least until the arrival of smartphone multi-touch screens and laptop trackpads.

Interaction grammars are not as complex as verbal or audiovisual grammars, but interface designers must respect their principles like any other speaker or writer if they want to be understood.

Breaking the rules

Although most user interfaces have been designed for doing activities like writing a text, sending an email, retouching a photo, changing television channels, driving a car or setting the oven temperature, sometimes interface designers create opaque interfaces. In other words: on some occasions the best interface is not the most transparent. This means that it is not compulsory to follow the guidelines of the usability gurus: if the interface designer is looking for an emotional experience and a deeper participation from the user, the best solution might be to blast the conventions and create a brand new interaction grammar. The interaction contract with the user will be much more intense and the user experience a long- lasting one.

From micro to macro-interactions

Interfaces are the place where complex perceptive and interpretative processes take place. It is possible to find conflict and cooperation, tension and collaboration in interfaces. This activity can be described as a permanent interplay of interaction proposals and interaction contracts in the context of an interaction grammar. If we consider the interface as just a tool or an instrument, these processes remain invisible to the analyst.

The interplay that we have identified in the micro-interactions of the individual actors can also be found at a macro-social level. The interface embodies conflicts and cooperation at both levels. If at the micro- level the conflict/cooperation is mostly perceptual and cognitive, at the macro-level the conflict/cooperation is conditioned by economic, social and political issues. Interfaces are political devices and they carry particular ideologies and conceptions of the world inside them (Ninth Law).

Note: This text is a synthesis of my book Las Leyes de la Interfaz published by Gedisa in 2018.

Previous > First Law. The interface is the place of interaction
Next > Third Law. Interfaces form an ecosystem

References

Coleridge S. T. (1817). Biographia Literaria (see Chapter XVI).

Eco, U. (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.

Norman, D. (1990a). The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Norman, D. (1990b). Why interfaces don’t work. In: Laurel, B. (ed) The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 210.

Scolari, C.A. (2001). Towards a semio-cognitive theory of human-computer interaction. CHI’01 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems; 2001 Mar 31 — Apr 5; New York: ACM, p. 85–86.

Scolari, C.A. (2009). The Sense of the interface: applying Semiotics to HCI research. Semiotica. 2009(177): 27.

Scolari, C.A. (2018). Las Leyes de la Interfaz. Diseño, ecología, evolución, tecnología. Barcelona: Gedisa.