user interface

Is usability being neglected?

CurtMonash — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:03:05 -0400

Doug Grant posed a question to me in a comment thread on his blog (emphasis mine):

... taking the application governance view of “great features” vs. “support costs”, this is generally a key issue that we don’t often have tools to quantify when buying or managing our enterprise applications, do you think? It just seems to me that the investment around measurement of application effectiveness and ROI pales in comparison to what we spend for hardware and software…. virtually invisible.
My blog problem inconvenienced you and other users, but how about enterprise apps we buy, the support costs of which are never tracked? Ideas?

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Mobile User Interfaces: Is Haptics the Answer?

Craig Mathias — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:30:02 -0500

There's probably no debate in IT more intense than that surrounding user interfaces. And, like so many other great technical (and, for that matter, social) issues, there is no single right answer. A UI is just that, the connection between the human and the incarnation of a technology that does something of use for the human. UIs should be, IMHO, simple, intuitive, and adapt over time to the needs of the specific user. They are otherwise at their best when they are constant, so as to minimize training and support costs.

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Deaf Leopard Developers and the Wisdom of a Crowd of Users

Mark Gibbs — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:29:58 -0400

(That title amused me far more than it should have ... that's the kind of day I'm having). So, what was I going to write about? Oh yeah: I just read a review of Apple's OS X Leopard release and, well, 'disappointing' is how the new user interface sounds.

The review, Doing the Leopard Moan, by Matt Neuburg on TidBITS paints a sad picture of what was an excellent user interface that experts, deaf to real world user input, have "improved."

I have to confess that I have yet to get my hands on Leopard but if even a quarter of Matt's criticisms of the UI are reasonable then Apple has taken a significant step backward rather than forward.

I find it curious that Apple seems have gone down a similar path to Microsoft with their Vista operating system and produced a product that appears to have been designed to meet marketing goals rather than user needs and wants. Sometimes improvements should be incremental - evolutionary rather than revolutionary - to ensure that people who want to remain productive don't have to change the ways that they think and work.

Imagine if the car industry pulled stunts like Apple and Microsoft have done with their user interfaces: When you got into your new car you would have to experiment for a few hours just to figure out how to turn on the radio and a few more to roll the windows up and down.

If only Apple had made all of the user interface "improvements" optional ... that would mean that if the new ideas were truly useful users would try them and stick with them while the UI features that didn't really work would languish. Apple could then learn from that process and ensure that the next round of polishing was built on solid ground. That's where the wisdom of crowds really pays off ...

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