I am currently in the Middle East and needless to say it is very hot here. The temperature hovers from 37 to 45+ Celsius. So as you can imagine the AC’s are on all day and you tend to want to drink a lot of water.

A funny thing happened to me, as I was about to start dinner at a friends house. He had a nice jug of water on the table, glasses and some appetizers. The main food was a bit delayed so after the starters were finished the jug of water was left. By then I had already had one glass of water but as there was nothing else on the table apart from the water and it was in front of me in an easy to pour jug, I kept on drinking it, until I nearly finished it.

This got me thinking, I have water at home but never this much, why was it that I drank more on this occasion (under the same circumstances). The simple and obvious truth is that it was the only thing available and in an easy to pour jug. If the water had been in a big 6 litre bottle that was difficult to pour, I would definitely not have had as much as I did. This is all well and good, but why am I writing about it?

Well I am no usability expert but I do like to try and design clean interfaces for the web apps I make. So from my experience with a jug of water I can take the following lessons as regards to designing interfaces.

1. Remove all distractions from the user, focus on one aspect at a time (in my case I only had water, so I kept on drinking it). If the user can only do one thing, more then likely they will do that. An example of this is if I am reading an article I clicked on, show me the article in a distraction free way. No related articles no recommendations just the text.
2. Make the design overly accessible (Big links, no small text, obvious copy). As the water jug was easy to pour I kept on pouring it. This could also translate to , ‘not making the user think’. By using defined defaults, blue links, links underlined etc. Although related to point 1, this could also include removing the navigation and allowing them to navigate to only one page and including context relevant links.

This might sound obvious and silly to many but I just thought it was interesting, so I wanted to blog about it. I am calling it the “Water Jug Theory” :)

As a side point I have redesigned this site to reflect the Water Jug Theory. I will keep that post for another time though. I will cover the design decisions I made and the inspiration I took for it and how that translated to the Ruby web framework I used (no, not Rails 3). I also plan on making the simple blog engine open source, so stay tuned.

Hamza

Image from Jenny Downing