37signals, the company behind the famous Ruby on Rails framework, has a blog on design on usability. The blog is called “Signal vs. Noise“. What a nice name. The name itself already inspired me to think a lot about design and usability.

When comparing Mac OS and Windows, some people would say that Mac OS “doesn’t get in the way”. So what does that mean? It means the OS does not distract you with things that are not related to the task you are doing. Windows tries to be friendly and/or impressive to novice users by providing lots of extra information and graphic. On the other hand, Mac OS tries to provide as little extra information as possible, and only use graphics and animations for functional purposes. While providing extra descriptions to help users can be useful, the very need of such kind of aid is already a smell of bad design. Furthermore, these extra descriptions, graphics, and animations take the focus away from the users.

The information that you are working on, like this article that you are reading, is the “signal” that you want. The other extra descriptions and flashes is the “noise” that is preventing you from receiving the signal efficiently. With this in mind, you may already understand why I think the name of the blog, “Signal vs. Noise” is such a great name: increasing the signal to noise ratio is increasing the usability of a user interface!

There are two things we can do to increase the ratio: to maximize the signal or minimize the noise. So to improve out user interface design, we first need to know what is the signal, and what is the noise.

To be continued (maybe).