Tog — “These bugs aren’t necessarily fatal. The are all at minimum highly irritating, and they have all survived for a minimum of five years or five product release cycles, whichever came first.”
ACM Queue — “It is therefore critical that the designers, architects, implementers, and operators of today’s IT infrastructures be aware of the human error problem and build in mechanisms for tolerating and coping with the errors that will inevitably occur. This article discusses some of the options available for embedding “coping skills” into an IT system.”
“Interdependence theory is established on the principle that the very essence of any interpersonal relationship is found in interaction between individuals. These interactions are highly dependent on the situations that people find themselves in when faced with interference in the relationship, with interference being a term used to describe conflict, miscommunication or opposing viewpoints. This founding idea can be directly related to a user’s experience with a company’s products. This is to say that the degree of user satisfaction is a function of the user’s interaction with the product of interest and the situation in which it is used.”
Interdependence theory? Huh?
“What is faceted navigation? It’s a way to browse information, or to refine long lists of search results, along multiple dimensions, aka facets. These are orthogonal lenses through which to view the world. For example, I might search for an expert by facets like name, project, company, or date—and more likely, by some combination of those facets, selected in any sequence.”
How are facets different than categories? Or, ad hoc keyword queries with structured results? What am I missing here?
“If you look at it from far away, it seems like writing a weblog entry and writing an email are about the same thing. You write some text—a few sentences, a few paragraphs, occasionally something longer—and send it somewhere, to another person or to a weblog. But if you look closer you notice that there’s a major difference in the attributes you can set in email versus a weblog entry.”
peterme — “So, here we have an example of an organization scheme that’s extremely useful to me, and likely impenetrable to others. This is what I mean when I say that “blurring” doesn’t feel right. I think there’s going to be an out-and-out tension to resolve.” (read more…)
This type of classification not as impenetrable as you might think, Peter.
McSweeneys — “For one amazing week in November, Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco has agreed to allow its estimated 20,000 books to be reclassified by color.” (read more… and see it…)
“The terms ground breaking, breakthrough, radical and innovative are thrown around enough that many are convinced this project is different from all others. Somehow in the belief that they’re doing breakthrough work, they allow themselves to believe that many of the basic lessons from other projects don’t apply anymore. As an antidote to the common management failures of v1 efforts, this essay explores the common mistakes with new efforts, and offers advice on how to avoid them.”
(Found via UI Designer.)
Don Norman — “Once we start to view design as a form of communication between designer and the user, we see that perceived affordances become an important medium for that communication. Designed affordances play a very special role. Now we see that the designer deliberately places signs and signals on the artifact to communicate with the user.”
Spool — “In those tasks where the users didn’t find their target, they were far more likely to use the site’s Search function than in those tasks where the description words appeared on the home page. When the words did appear, users usually clicked on the associated links instead of using Search. In fact, when users did eventually go to Search, they almost always typed one or more of the description words as their search terms. It makes sense to us that users would use their description as their search term. This was when we realized the failed searches in a site’s search log are important clues to understanding the users’ trigger words.”
Here is a game for you. Like golf, the fewer clicks you have the better your score. Each click is one point. Post your scores in the comments section.
HOW TO PLAY AND SOME RULES
1. Go to the World Wide Web Consortium.
2. Clicking on a link, any link.
3. Your core objective is to get to a web page that has no links!
4. Every click costs you one point.
5. If there is even one link on a page, you must click it.
6. You cannot type. You can only click. Click, click, click.
7. Any type of link is link. A link is a link is a link. A click is a click.
Quick FAQ
Q. Are you kidding?
A. Nope.
Q. It can’t be done!
A. That’s not a question and it can be done.
Q. You are a liar. Every page on the web has links on it.
A. Really?
Digital Web — “The critical factor is ensuring a balanced view and execution. Thoroughly tested usability and a well-constructed architecture are only part of the story. Business, brand, experience design, programming, hardware and network analysis—among other things—must be incorporated and given appropriate weight. This requires more than knowledge and experience. Leading a successful Web project demands a healthy respect for how these varied disciplines interrelate, and the courage and focus to push for solutions that not only meet the quantitative metrics but also strive to innovate, differentiate and delight.”
Stating the obvious? Usability done well is never done in a vacuum. Furthermore, usability is not a single thing at all. It draws on many people, many forces. By the way, if you think I am defending usability, you are wrong. I’m one of the most likely people to attack it.
There is a surprising amount of usability information available in the world. There are many excellent books and web sites, and many people with the knowledge necessary to make a difference. I’m happy to say that usability is maturing. It is still hard to precisely define, but the general concept is getting firm.
However, despite great leaps forward, usability hasn’t made much of an impact. Certainly some web sites, products, and services are better, but overall usability isn’t changing the world.
Usability knowledge has increased and there are some great tools available, but the problem is that the knowledge and tools aren’t getting into the hands of designers and developers. Usability is an island that keeps growing, but it is still an island. What needs to happen is usability specialists need to create bridges. They need to find ways to move usability into the minds of the people that are building stuff. Training programs would help too.
I think it is funny, ironic really, that most usability specialists never talk to designers or developers. They preach, they write, the moan. But, they don’t get up and talk to designers and developers. Until usability folks weave themselves into the fabric of the development process, the power of usability will be lost. Until the language of developers and designers meets up with the language of usability specialists, it’ll be horses talking to pigs.
I’ll spin this message another way. Usability is awesome but it is no good when it is outside the culture of a company. Until a company decides that it cares about customers — how they think and how they operate — usability will be left out in the cold. Designers and developers need to understand that the business needs usability to survive and thrive. It is a competitive advantage, but designers and developers will ignore it until management makes it clear that products are too hard to use.
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