Akshay Kulkarni

Best User Interface

The best user interface which I probably think would be the interface of YouTube. The reason for choosing this website is that it is one of the largest databases for videos on the internet. YouTube has more than one billion unique users who visit the website daily and 80% of this traffic is from outside the United States. Over 6 billion hours of videos are watched every month on YouTube.
The interface is clear and concise for the website and the user gets familiar with it pretty easily. The options and the actions on the screen are pretty intuitive and easily usable.
YouTube has maintained a constant philosophy throughout its existence that once an entirely new layout is designed then the user loses the familiarity and acquaintance gained from the previous interface. The user ambiguity about the new interface may lead to some sort of hindered usage.
YouTube along with its brilliant design and architecture is aesthetically pleasing which helps maintain a bond with the user using the interface. New features added every now and then are more willingly accepted by the users because of this.
A wide variety of features make the interface one of the best which I have used. YouTube presents the user with videos which are based on previously watched videos which makes the user’s job very easy and keeps the user hooked onto the topics which he/she finds interesting. Another feature is the top charts compiled by YouTube which allows users to watch videos without having to browse.
Some of the other features include letting the user to tailor and edit videos before uploading them and lets the user add annotations, subtitles and captions which help in portraying the video better. It also has the feature to bookmark any video to let the user to watch it later. This is very easy to remember any videos which are to be watched later. One of the most amazing features is that YouTube remembers which videos the user has watched and in case the user has aborted watching the video in between then the next time the user watches the video, it resumes playback from the same time.
Along with a lot of other feature YouTube is a very good user interface design, which succeeds in most of the goals of human computer interaction. It has functionality to do a wide array of tasks along with being simple, intuitive and pleasing to the eye.

Worst User Interface

A couple of interfaces which I feel are not good are examples of day to day functionalities which people have been using from a long time.
The first interface is that of switches. Switches are present on switch boards arranged in a file in almost every room in every building. A user gets accustomed to the layout of the switches in familiar places only. These places include the home and work area. The user knows precisely which button does what and is able to operate the switches without ambiguity. But what if the user is in an unfamiliar place and faces the task to switch on something in the room. The user does not know which switch operated what and the only way to know is trying out every switch until the desired outcome results. This may not be a problem when there are fewer switches but when the number is large then a lot of power is wasted by lot of people to switch on something. This design may have resulted from the need to produce switches with the least amount of material and low costs. But the idea has become has such basic that it is still continued.
This interface can be improved by using a switch board with intuitive layouts for the switches rather than the commonly used file layout. The board should give the user a pretty good idea of what switch does what. Segregation of the switch into categories of devices is the first step; such segregation for example would be dividing switches into lights and fans and then spacing them out according to the orientation of the room. A diagram of the room layout on the switch board will easily help the user figure out which switch does what and saves both time and power.
The second interface would be that of the buttons on the outside of the elevator to call it. The idea behind it pretty simple, if you want to go up then press the up button and if you want to go down then press the down button. But most of the people who are not aware of this or have a hard time understanding the mechanism find it intuitively opposite. The reason for this intuitively the user has the idea that the switches control the lift, which is true on some level but the mechanism does not work that way.
If the user is on a floor below and the user wants to go down then user subconsciously presses the up button wanting the lift to come up. But the consequence of this is the lift comes up to carry the passenger to an upper level. The same is true for the opposite case. This leads to a lot of wastage, both of time and energy. In buildings where the number of floors is very huge and the size of the elevators is big, such a tiny misconception tends to lead to energy and time wastage because each time the elevator stops and the doors open.
To improve this design elevators have come up with new panels for the switches which are more intuitive and does not rely on the user understanding the mechanism. One other design is that instead of the switches on the outside, a keypad is fitted. The user just needs to enter the floor number he desires to go to and the elevator handles the mechanism internally. This saves a lot of energy and valuable time.