More Proselytizing

[mundens]

I was going to post this as a reply to a comment on holding_pattern's LJ, but then I thought "hell, this stuff is the sort of thing more people need to know about!" So for HP and anyone else :

It's this Jakob Nielsen I was referring to. He works with Don Norman at the Nielsen/Norman Group.

Don is probably best known for The Design of Everyday Things though

Comments

Usability

[repton_infinity]

My life has been greatly improved by my learning about the study of usability. Now, whenever I can't figure out how to use something (software, other technological stuff), I don't think "I am dumb", but rather, "What a crap user interface this is" :-)

Re: Usability

[mundens]

Which is as you should think!

Apply it to other things as well!

Don't think "I'm dumb because I can't understand this text book", think "this text-book writer needs help writing text books"

It is not up to the customer to understand the product, the product must understand the customer! :)

OTOH, one has to realize there are limits to just how noob freindly a system can be and still remain usable for regular users, and how much usability can be pushed into the interface for a 3cm long, 1cm wide mp3 player.
:)

[evie_fae]

Your tags are all crazy... o_O

And I've been reading a book by Jakob Nielsen that our web guy, Julian, has on his desk. It's cool. ^__^

[mundens]

Thanks for the feed back! That's another thing a good website needs to be able to do, respond to customer comments quickly, especially when they find and tell you about a bug! It's all about connecting with your users!

I think this story from The HughTrain exemplifies this!

Yes, Nielsen's good, I found Desiging Web Usability and his book on internationalization both really useful and fun to read!