Sprezzatura is an old Italian word defined as “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them.” In other words, making it look effortless. This is an important trait for user-centered design: the workflow, actions, and methods a user takes through the design should make the experience pleasant and as simple as possible.

I like the idea of old words to describe concepts which have become so full to bursting with just a certain type of meaning, that they exist as themselves – untranslatable. Words like panache or schadenfreude or (to quote Kim Loop) tacos. There should be a certain amount of the untranslatable in design, too; something that helps users navigate the difficult and deep concepts that we ask them to follow. Think about how many interactions a user must go through to purchase goods and services for an e-commerce site or how many fields must be filled out to sign up for a new service from a provider. These interactions can happen because UX designers and developers have paved the way – made it seem simple and clean.

The best way to make the hard stuff look easy is through research: find out what your users get caught up on, find out what they want most in your interface, and find out what makes your users trust you. Keep testing, through A/B testing, constant design tweaks and polling your users. I’ve always liked programs like Silverback and doing task-based polls with simple click-based tasks. By taking stock of what your users find difficult, you can make that difficult time seem easy. Capiche?

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So much has happened in the past few weeks (both personally and in the tech world) that I’m updating twice this week to make up for last week. I wanted to write about the iPad, but I’m going to save it for another day. I had to comment on my friend Mike Melanson’s (@rwwmike) Read Write Web article (read the full thing, especially the comments).

Because I’m a friend to Mike, and I like RWW, I subscribe to their RSS feed via Google reader. I therefore missed all the amazing comments that ensued from users. I’m now very sorry I did. Here’s just a small sampling of what comments a post called “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login” got:

ok cool now can I get to facebook (fuccinwayne)

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN. (John Blair)

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! (Nicole Gray)

What is going on? You are totally confusing me. Knock-knock. Anybody there? Let me in. Katherine (Katherine Radway Hegedus)

By now you get the idea: There are somewhere in the range of 200+ comments like these. It took me a while to understand what was going on, but it dawned on me that the RWW article ranked higher in the Google search rank than did the Facebook login page. This means someone did the following steps 100% blindly (or autopilot):

1. typed “login facebook” into Google
2. clicked the first link without looking at the link or description
3. ignored the red color scheme of Read Write Web
4. dismissed the huge article in the middle of the page until they found a Facebook icon (Facebook connect)
5. without looking at the address bar or any authentication, logged in as if to Facebook
6. finding the comment field the only place to post, ignoring all other comments, posted an angry or confused question as if Facebook were a person

David Hayes (@drhayes) has a beautiful shot that it’s much more than Facebook on his blog.

As a user experience developer, this brings up all sorts of questions, concerns, and feelings of dread. As a user experience developer I certainly know that I’m not my audience or even close to it, but I do think I have an understanding of how things work. I had no idea how heavy the reliance on Google to get a user where they wanted to go was. I wasn’t sure that so many users had gotten so adept at filtering out such amazing amounts of noise, they saw Read Write Web as Facebook.

Users seem not to use the address bar, they don’t use bookmarks, and hardly read anything. This isn’t bad, it’s not saying these users are dumb, but it brings up a need to fix these interfaces for users. This is just a time where I feel like a priest in the Dark Ages: preaching the only written word through a language no one understands. It freaks me out when I peer into the actions of users who are using the sites and I can’t begin to fathom the thought process or the use case.

Talking with less tech savvy friends and family, they are amazed that I “know all this stuff” when I myself feel I don’t know much at all until I look at it from the other end: this is my job and my life – I am of the priest class, talking in cryptic language, trying to navigate the dark for my flock. I try my hardest to treat these things as material to learn, to grow in my understanding of the philosophy of the user.

Part of me can’t help but think – did users learn the behavior that caused them to act that way because we trained them that way?

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Horizontal Buttonholes
Buttonholes serve to keep the garment fastened, plain and simple. The reason buttonholes in dress shirts run vertically is two fold: one one hand, the vertical lines look good with vertical stripes and stitching, and on the other, the vertical buttonhole keeps the button in the middle of the hole while making sure that no stress unbuttons it. Two holes in the shirt, however, have different stress points: the neckline (the collar) and the waistline (at the belt level).

The neck and hips both rotate horizontally while the chest and stomach, when they do rotate, rotate vertically along the spine. This causes stress to be placed in the opposite direction from the position of the vertical buttonholes at these locations. Tailors, being the designers they are, came up with a nifty solution:

Horizontal buttonholes at the waist and neck now distribute the pressure from twisting motion! But wait, doing so suddenly ruins the nice, clean centered button everytime force is applied. The button will slide from the middle, to the opposite side of the force and back again. That wouldn’t look good, except these buttons are hidden from view by the tie at the neckline and the belt and trousers at the waistline. Brilliant!

Gusset Reinforcements
Speaking of pressure, the shirt has pressure applied anyplace that two pieces of fabric meet. Normally seams take all this pressure, but what of areas that require openings such as the cuffs and the space where the front and back tails meet along the coronal plane of the body? Over time, tailors found these meeting of the folds took much of the stress of the garment. To solve this and make the shirts last longer, tailors employed gussets: small pieces of fabric and stitch that held fast like so:

These reinforcements are not that noticeable, but they add long-term value to the shirt while solving a fundamental problem, which keeps the user happy as their shirt secretly holds up throughout the day

Undercollar Construction
The collar of a shirt is arguably one of the most distinctive aspects to the shirt. Button down, point, or wing collars all give a clean line to the face of the gent wearing it. Tailors know this but they also know that men sweat and need to wash the shirt over and over again in its lifetime. The problem with washing is the shrinking effect it can have on fabric. To keep the points clean and the collar looking sharp, Tailors build in undercollars. Undercollars are woven differently than the top collar to not pull on the top fabric if they shrink:

The undercollar really highlights a good user experience in that the shirt, despite repeated cleaning, looks great everytime. The undercollar is almost never, ever seen, much less noticed, yet it just works to make the user appreciate the forward-facing part of the shirt.

Buttons and Stitching
Buttons and stitches are the main reinforcements of the garment, and as such, need to be sturdy and many. Buttons on well made shirts are generally pearl, rather than plastic. Though Tailors found that it was cheaper to use plastic or resin buttons, they cause the buttons to slip from their holes easier and can chip and crack more often than their stronger pearl counterparts. Stitches hold all the pieces of the garment together, so the more per square inch, the more the shirt feels like a single piece, moving as one.

The phrase, “A stitch in time, may save nine” is literal here. This translates to any user experience developer: by spending the time and effort to make the experience better up front, the system becomes easier to maintain and by thinking of the details, the major pieces are already in place.

When developing a user experience, think about the ways the user will operate the system. Where will the user notice problems? Where will the pain points be? By gathering feedback and thinking critically, we can reinforce the way the user interacts to ensure a seamless and brilliant feel for our users. By taking care of the problems the user might run into, be provide an interface that the user feels is bespoke, made for them. When we do things right, the experience is as nice and comfortable as your favorite shirt.

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