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41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

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Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#51

Post by doublespanner »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #48
doublespanner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

Good luck designing aircraft cockpit with this kind of thinking.

You are missing the point, it's obvious that a cockpit needs to account for stress or a crisis. Extending this to CAD software for example is nonsense.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#52

Post by Qwertious »

tbitrust wrote: post #31
zer00eyz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” — George Carlin You get that when I was on the other side of that 2 way mirror one of the qualifications to be a user was "can you use a mouse". As late as 2005 people being able to navigate a basic web form was quite the challenge. Find someone far removed from tech and ask them if they have used ChatGPT. That IQ 90 user st…

I don't think that people "far removed from tech" are "sub-90 IQ" (a "delicate" euphemism for "stupid"). And I don't think that people on facebook, youtube or tick tock are "sub-90 IQ". Thanks for making clear that it's what was implied by the original commenter. That's lack of empathy coupled with sheer, crass ignorance.

"sub-90 IQ", when interpreted literally, means the dumbest 25% of the population. I think it's awfully important to remember not to ignore 1/4 of the population.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#53

Post by omeid2 »

doublespanner wrote: post #51
ivan_gammel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck designing aircraft cockpit with this kind of thinking.

You are missing the point, it's obvious that a cockpit needs to account for stress or a crisis. Extending this to CAD software for example is nonsense.

Why? Is it because you think CAD can't be stressful and under pressure or that people shouldn't do CAD when stressed or under pressure?

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#54

Post by oh_sigh »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #49
doublespanner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

You know very well that “retards” isn’t an acceptable word. It’s not even used in scientific literature anymore in the way that you’re using it.

Shouldn't it be up for grabs then?

According to the logic of "you don't call retarded people retarded. You call your friends retarded when they're acting retarded."

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#55

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #40
karaterobot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind. There i…

>The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have Keyword: situational disability Even a perfectly fit and educated target audience sometimes suffers from certain conditions or in an environment that significantly reduces their mental or physical capacity. Stress, injury, pregnancy, too many beers, very long nails, terrible weather, a toddler trying to grab your ph…

Pick your favorite programming language. Do you think it should be tested on people in a nursing home? I'd argue that's the wrong audience. (A programming language isn't a graphical user interface, but it is a user interface!)

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#56

Post by [deleted] »

micheljansen wrote: post #3

Nielsen's usability heuristics, arguably his most impactful work, still hold up surprisingly well after more than 30 years. It's hard to understate the impact he has had on my own career, as well as the UX field as a whole (together with Don Norman, of course). Also sobering to read how much of his career seems obvious in hindsight, but also was shaped so much by randomness and chance (such as taking not taking the j…

[deleted]

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#57

Post by ivan_gammel »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #55
ivan_gammel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have Keyword: situational disability Even a perfectly fit and educated target audience sometimes suffers from certain conditions or in an environment that significantly reduces their mental or physical capacity. Stress, injury, pregnancy, too many beers, very long nails, terrible weather, a toddler trying to grab your ph…

Pick your favorite programming language. Do you think it should be tested on people in a nursing home? I'd argue that's the wrong audience. (A programming language isn't a graphical user interface, but it is a user interface!)

Programming language is not a user interface, it is a way to describe commands. The UI in this case would be the way to enter the program, e.g. punch cards, text editor or IDE, or AI copilot. People who can write code are very broad audience and of course all accessibility requirements must apply.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#58

Post by _gabe_ »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #57
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick your favorite programming language. Do you think it should be tested on people in a nursing home? I'd argue that's the wrong audience. (A programming language isn't a graphical user interface, but it is a user interface!)

Programming language is not a user interface, it is a way to describe commands. The UI in this case would be the way to enter the program, e.g. punch cards, text editor or IDE, or AI copilot. People who can write code are very broad audience and of course all accessibility requirements must apply.

A programming language is absolutely a user interface. The error messages and diagnostics emitted by the language are the feedback mechanisms. The syntax and semantics are the design of the interface. The documentation is the user manual. Text editors, IDEs, punch cards and AI copilot are all separate UIs on top of whatever programming language you happen to be using.

After all, TUIs are a thing and nobody debates that they are also user interfaces. Just because a programming language is all text doesn’t mean that usability metrics don’t exist for it.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#59

Post by AtlasBarfed »

I would be interested in the long perspective of constantly reinvented gui toolkits and what he thinks is progress vs reinvention.

Early html was surely reinvention, but CSS gave us the first fine grained presentation customization mechanism.

Material design? If I was a Soviet despot... Well anyway.

Ui is alas more fashion than function. I remember the original iPhone and is realistic apps, which angered UI designers so much that we now have buttons with no visible feedback as to if they are clicked, and anonymous unicolor squares everywhere.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#60

Post by lastdong »

doublespanner wrote: post #46
ivan_gammel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have Keyword: situational disability Even a perfectly fit and educated target audience sometimes suffers from certain conditions or in an environment that significantly reduces their mental or physical capacity. Stress, injury, pregnancy, too many beers, very long nails, terrible weather, a toddler trying to grab your ph…

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

I think the point is that you can design for peak effectiveness while considering usability, and that makes the tool more effective. There’s a lot more scrutiny on edge cases when designing expert tools.

On “Expert Tools” I’d argue it’s imperative to consider high stress levels interactions, because the outcome outweighs the expert using it.

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