Missing Features

Take a look at this print preview screen from Adobe Photoshop C3:

How do you change the paper orientation from portrait to landscape? It’s not clear. Turns out you use these two icons, under the image preview area:

The problem is that the control does not make clear whether these icons rotate the image or the paper. A quick 5-user test or even a hallway usability test would demonstrate that these icons just don’t cut it.

The designer has two options to improve this pane:

1. Label these icons to make the control more clear; or,
2. Use a different control.

When a button requires a label to be properly understood by the user, you need a better button.

Building a better control

What might a better control look like? Always run a user test to confirm your findings. But your correspondent is willing to bet that when designing a button that controls landscape and portrait orientation the control ought to say something like portrait and landscape.

Clever design is wonderful; overly clever design is painful.

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