Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold. Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users. Interrupt the […]
Watson from Intellext
OK, you have to go download Watson, which provides contextual search (of the web, from your desktop). The context that it uses is whatever application is open on your desktop – specifically MS Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, IE and Firefox. This morning I was working on a “How to design unit […]
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 forced to focus on the tool, and […]
More on talking to your audience
I was reading ok-cancel today, and saw an article about getting UI designs ‘through the gauntlet’ of different groups of people at the client. Kevin and Tom consistently provide great insights on how to thrive in the HCI world, providing insights both in how to navigate customer-politics and processes, and […]
User Centric Design Yields (Not So?) Obvious Features
An application lives or dies by its ability to allow users to achieve the goals that drive the creation of (or purchase of) the software.
Concept Maps – Great Tool for Eating the Elephant (Brainstorming Ideas for a New Product)
Concept mapping is a tool I use for the brainstorming process of defining a product’s specification. IHMC developed the concept mapping software that we show in this article