61–70 of 83 posts
I agree with many of the things said in the article. I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed listed. (Clear code, documentation, easy to get started, reasonable defaults, support, etc.) It happens so often that I interact with such OSS projects and it's so hard to work with them. I feel bad for all the honest effort that these people put into the core part…
How many unusable software products came about because of Visual Basic? I can rant and rant about Copper.
There is really no mystery about UI. Yes, it requires skill and a deep knowledge of how humans process information, and even a touch of design genius. But the real problem is that most shops can't measure usability in a fine-grained way. And yet everyone does have some idea that it's really important. Consequently they are bamboozled by anyone who purports to have such expertise. For the most part, so-called usabilit…
You know, I thought I had UI design mostly figured out, using a few simple rules: * Minimise the total number of clicks needed to access the sum of the program's functionality. * Make frequently-used functionality easier to reach than rarely-used functionality. * Don't have more elements in the UI than is easy to parse quickly. * No surprises. However, after reading this article, I get the feeling that it's a more ar…
So your right with the number of clicks, but you also have to make sure that the user can complete the task (effectiveness), and that they are happy (satisfaction). From our own research the three; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction are very highly correlated together.
Colophon: The Long Beards, (Latin Langobardi , later "Lombards") were a tribe of Germanic "barbarians" who settled in Northern Italy in the late 500s AD. They were primarily responsible for thwarting the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's campaign to reconquer Italy and re-establish the Western Empire. http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/images/alboin.jpg Today Lombardy is the most populous of Italy's 20 regions and…
We have a situation at work just like this: the inherited backend code is dreadful, full of WTFs due to poor implementation, lack of knowledge and lack of planning and design. It's eating away our profit margins. New features and customization take far longer than they should, and time estimates are impossible. Bugs, from simple UI stuff to server issues, are numerous and end up adding to customer support costs, not to mention reputation.
Do the management understand this ? Nope, they just consider these costs to be the normal cost of doing business in this sector. We have pleaded time and again to rewrite and refactor the code, but never given the time or leeway because the sales team want the latest shiny feature to sell to the client.
The irony is that we have a healthy and growing user base and top-rank clients. An outside competitor (of which the developers are aware, but about which the management are oblivious) are about to eat our lunch because they can simply execute better and faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals." The dilemma is that human language is staggeringly ambiguous. This works because human beings have an extremely sophisticated model of other human beings in their head and a really good pattern matching facility, which mak…
One of the issues is that current UIs for computers have very little context information about whats on screen, which would make language based interaction much more convenient. Also, editing a photo is a perfect example of where language interface would be useful: instead of hunting through Photoshop's millions of menus for the graphic effect you want, you could just say/type things like: Scale to 200% Increase cont…
"couldn't care less", please. How can you be hackers if you can't get some basic logic right?
Folks interested in a look into his more current thinking might want to take a look at his keynote for Agile 2008 http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/08/alans_keynote_at_agile..., and his keynote at Interaction 08 http://interaction08.ixda.org/Alan_Cooper.php.
And from his involvement in things like the http://www.andersramsay.com/2010/02/04/notes-from-the-agile-... things are moving on from there too.
There's a large chunk of the UX community that's moving away from the developers-as-enemy attitude. And vice versa for the developer community I hope :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I thought I had UI design mostly figured out, using a few simple rules: * Minimise the total number of clicks needed to access the sum of the program's functionality. * Make frequently-used functionality easier to reach than rarely-used functionality. * Don't have more elements in the UI than is easy to parse quickly. * No surprises. However, after reading this article, I get the feeling that it's a more ar…
In my opinion it isn't arcane, at least, no more arcane than other "soft" design fields. But the simple rules are complicated to follow. Your first three principles are about efficiency. That's a big part of usability. When you reduce clutter, you make it easier to use by clarifying the next action the user should take. But "No surprises" is rather complex. It means that you not only have to explain what you are doin…