The Interface is the System

From the Adaptive Path blog, a great story that cuts to the heart about the importance of careful graphic and functional design:

My family is participating in the Guest at Your Table again this year. It’s a program that collects money for social justice causes. The cardboard box that you put money into sits on your dinner table, and on one side of the box is a panel about people not having access to clean drinking water. As I explained this to my six-year-old daughter, her response was, “Wow, we’re so lucky to have faucets!” For her, the whole system of reservoirs, pipes, plumbing, sewage treatment, etc. was completely summarized by the one visible part of the system: the faucets.

How often this is true, especially with digital products. What users physically experience represents the system to them, and how it works. The interface is the system. You can have the greatest interaction design or information architecture in the world, but wrapped in crappy industrial or visual design with poor affordances, the entire system is perceived to be bad.

“The interface is the system.” This is so true, and something we struggle with in the nonprofit space. I would go even farther than these guys have: for the many applications that are trying to be mainstream, it doesn’t matter how incredibly nifty the functionality is. If the 60 year old, non-technical director of development can’t figure out how to use it - in fact, if she isn’t inspired to use it because it’s easy and un-intimidating looking – the functionality might as well not exist.