There is such a thing as too much choice. For new users, too much choice (or control) is too much. For experienced users, too little choice is a problem. Ease of use usually comes from reduced control – but users don’t stay “new” for long. There’s a “canyon of pain” to quote Kathy Sierra in that transition from “new” to “experienced.” We call them “competent” users and we have to help them cross the canyon of pain.
Category Archives: Usability

Usability Sells Software – Word of Mouth Marketing
There are three main models for selling software. You can hire a direct sales force. You can spend a lot on marketing and advertising. You can let your users sell the software for you, a technique commonly known as viral marketing. There’s a catch with viral marketing – users have to like your software.


Office 2007 UX Victory
Microsoft Office 2007 has a completely new user interaction paradigm.
The old interfaces for Microsoft Office 2003 (and earlier) organized the menu structures around features or capabilities. Each grouping represented tasks that appeared to be related in functionality. This, unfortunately, doesn’t help the user very much. The new interface is very task based, and organizes capabilities based upon the task the user is currently performing. What the Office team has done is innovate. And the innovations differentiate them from every other business application I’ve ever seen.

Foundation Series: User Experience Disciplines
UX, pronounced you-ex, is the shorthand for user-experience. It represents the science and art of tailoring the experience that users have with a product – in our case, software. UX is a relatively new term, rapidly overtaking HCI (human-computer interface) and CHI (computer-human interface) as the acronym du jour. There are several disciplines within this field, we’ll introduce each of them.

Death by a thousand cuts: Usability problems add up
topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2006%2F01%2F08%2Fdeath-by-a-thousand-cuts-usability-problems-add-up%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “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 [...]

Getting Past The ’Suck Threshold’
topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2005%2F12%2F14%2Fgetting-past-the-suck-threshold%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “Getting Past The ’Suck Threshold’” }); Kathy Sierra writes a great post in her blog, Creating Passionate Users, that talks about the requirement to make things interesting. The driving objective is to accelerate the user adoption curve – which Kathy calls the Kick Ass Curve. Any user is initially [...]





