Sometimes you can learn a lesson about interface design deep in the woods. This is the story of a map, a trail and a nerd.

For the last couple of weeks my wife and I have been vacationing in Ontario’s Near North. That’s the part of the province urban dwellers hugging the Niagara Escarpment call Up North and folks from Timmins call The Tropics.

We spent some time doing some wilderness hiking around Temagami. As our guide we had a freshly minted map of a just-launched trail system. The trails would take us, the map said, over inclines and rolling rockscapes that led to stunning vistas or passed through old growth forest.

All true, but the trick of the trek, we discovered, lay in actually being able to find the new trails using the young map.

It turned out that an employee at the outfitters where we bought the map was instrumental in planning and blazing the trails. His name was Les and he was, and I mean this with great respect and affection, a hiking geek.

Les revelled in the nerdish details of his passion and was naively unaware, in the way only geeks can be, that his vacationing audience didn’t want quite so much information about trail history, recent rescues and the finer points of GPS sampling rates.

What we did want were clear, unambiguous directions for finding the right backroads or thinly gravelled and rutted paths we needed to take so we could set foot on the trailheads. These the map did not provide, at least not with sufficient clarity for urban dwelling Escarpment huggers.

Les, despite his best efforts, was the opposite of helpful on this score. We discovered, when we actually got out into the woods, that his directions included details and clues that would only make sense to Temagamites and truckers.

Worse, he left out details like, “the trail actually starts 50 metres past the railway track, but the sign’s sort of hidden.” We made a 500 metre false start along the track before we sorted that out.

In another case, the map shows a road leading to the trail, but when you get 10 kilometres along its potholed, rocky distance you come across a “No Trespassing” sign we learned you just ignore. We had to get directions from blueberry pickers on ATVs to sort that out.

In the following days we returned to the outfitters to report on our troubles finding the trails (which were spectacular). Les offered a mildly guilty chuckle and asked, “but you eventually found it, right?” We agreed we had and repeated the difficulty; Les returned to his work, happy in the knowledge we’d seen the trails he loved.

Okay, so here we have a new user interface, the map; one of its engineers, Les; and two naive users, my wife and me.

We were the perfect usability cohort for the new interface. We didn’t know the area, its ad hoc and confusing signage and its bifurcating side roads.

So, why didn’t Les pay attention to the news that the very sort of people he wanted to use the trails and spread the news about them couldn’t even find them just using the interface he had helped design?

Partly, I think, it’s because hikers like Les kind of enjoy the game of finding a trail. They’re like engineers who create a 27 button TV remote because they like a lot of buttons. And, they can’t really imagine that everyone else doesn’t enjoy it too. That’s just the way they’re wired.

It’s also because Les is a local and knows the “No Trespassing” sign is a red herring. To him his instructions were the essence of clarity.

Also Les was busy organizing daytrips and selling product. He really didn’t have time to pause for details.

Finally it’s because Les loves the map. He and his committee worked on it for months and now it’s finally published and people are buying it and using it to “eventually find the trails.” That’s all positive feedback. Les is using what psychologists call data blindness and confirmation bias to screen details that don’t conform with what he believes, which is that: “the map is wonderful.”

I’m sure you’ve seen this in your organization and with your website. But you can’t fall so in love with your creation that you fail to listen to the real world experiences of naive users.

For them your map is not familiar terrain and if they can’t use it to get where they want to go they’ll wander off confused and never return.

In a perfect world the map should have been tested on naive users before it was printed. Your website should have been too but probably wasn’t.

That’s too bad because the best feedback you can get is often from babes in the wood.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...