Death by a thousand cuts: Usability problems add up

In Those “Minor” Usability Annoyances, Daniel Read at developer.* writes in on a topic that resonates with me.

Daniel describes working on a critical application with multi-year, continuous development and a couple hundred internal users. I’m currently helping a client incorporate automated unit testing for a similar enterprise application, and Ive helped teams manage the fixing of the same kinds of problems.

Daniel describes how a multitude of small usability problems add up to make the application all but unusable, one user even describing himself as a victim of the system.

He has some good insights into what’s wrong and suggestions on how to prevent the mistakes. He also provides a sample of approaches on how to fix existing problems.

We recently covered some major usability blunders and solutions too.