Cmd-Z, white space, and the alpine interface.
I like to write about unconventional user interfaces. Like cities and ski resorts. I don’t know about you, but my favorite place to be in the whole wide world, at just about any given moment, is on a ski lift. My heavy feet dangling low with the weight of my skis. Each leg like a ripe tree branch, holding tight to its luscious burden of winter fruit. The white space – o, the beautiful white space – of all that shimmering snow beneath me.
Copper Mountain was the last place I got to do this. It was a magnificent day in February: sunny, sparkly, all blue and bright. As only a winter day in Colorado can be. My friend Christina and I, friends since that lavendar-kissed, cobblestone-scented Mediterranean summer of 1996, decided to meet two miles above sea level. We hadn’t seen each other since Charlotte, North Carolina; Summer 2008.
Christina’s the kind of friend that every girl should have. Level-headed, happy, and sensible, but with a penchant for dark humor and a vocabulary of French profanities. Yessssssss. We roamed the streets of Aix-en-Provence together, skinny-dipped (well, practically) in Provençal lakes, jumped off cliffs into the Côte d’Azur, and whispered American epithets at French rudeness behind its back. “Stupid French fuckers,” we used to say. All the while loving everything about the French: their culture, their language, their dress, their food. We both have a knack for foreign languages and our French was good enough to pass as Euro Francophone: no one guessed we were American.
But anyway, back to unconventional interfaces. Do you ever view the world through a design lens? Well, I do. I try not to, but I can’t help it. Honestly, it gets tiresome after a while, annoying, even. But I can’t stop. No matter how hard I shut my eyes, I can’t. Stop. Seeing. And this is the kind of stuff I see: mountains as interfaces. Ski runs as systems design.
Copper Mountain is about two hours west of Denver on I-70. It’s actually only 30 miles from Leadville, one of the Colorado mining towns I grew up in. My brother served on ski patrol at Copper Mountain, back in the 70s. I was born in Aspen and may as well have entered the world wearing a White Stag sweater, sunblock and skis. I started skiing at two, which probably explains my love of ski lifts. One of my earliest memories – if not my earliest one – is being cradled on the chairlift by my mom, going down the mountain instead of up. I broke my leg skiing at age three.
You’d think I’d be an expert skier by now, given my alpine heritage, but I’m not. I’m fairly good and very comfortable on skis, but I’m not a risk taker. Normally, I stick to blue and green runs – if you’re not familiar with ski run ratings, green is easy; blue is intermediate; and black is expert only. Not having skiied in Colorado since my 20s, I quickly remembered that in Colorado, green = blue, blue is closer to black, and black is, well, definitely not for me.
Luckily, the designers of Copper Mountain were smart. If you look at the map above, you’ll see that the mountain is roughly divided: beginner slopes on the western side of the mountain, intermediate slopes in the center, and expert terrain on the eastern side. Advanced “double black diamond” slopes are located on the two 12,000+ ft peaks (Copper and Union Peaks), including four black diamond bowls: Copper Bowl, Union Bowl, Spaulding Bowl, and Resolution Bowl. Looking at this through an interface design lens, one can perform an impromptu heuristic analysis and see good usability principles in practice:
Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
Okay. See chairlift operating? Cold, white fluffy stuff on the ground? System is running. Go ski.
User control and freedom
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
In honor of this heuristic, many of the runs at Copper Mountain connect with flat trails traversing horizontally across the mountain. If you inadvertently head down a blue run that you’re not ready for, you can traverse over to an easier green one. Cmd+Z on skis!
Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
By the basic layout of the mountain alone, errors (death, even!) are prevented. Since the most difficult runs are only accessible on one side of the mountain and in the bowls, the likelihood of a novice skier ending up on a black diamond by accident are practically nil.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Well, there are warning signs all over the place. Like the big one near the Copper Bowl that I read before I started to go down. The one that said “EXPERT SKIERS ONLY”. Recognizing and diagnosing are one thing, however. Recovering is quite another. Have you ever had to take your skis off and climb back up a slope? Uuuh, yeah. At 12,000 ft above sea level? Enough said.
I thought I read or heard somewhere that the design of the Copper Mountain interface, if you will, was revolutionary for its time. Especially notable is the “error prevention” resulting from segration of ski runs. Interaction design, of all the other design disciplines, is one where an error due to poor design can mean life or death.
On that note, wait ’til I tell you about the congenitally blind guy I met on the Colorado Jitney to Copper. He was on his way to Vail and skis double-black diamonds. Blind. Double-black. I’M NOT JOKING.