26 January 2001
25 January 2001
18 January 2001
Tonight I was watching the special features on the Guns of Navarone DVD. One of the comments the director made about Anthony Quinn struck me. He mentioned that Quinn could act out a scene in a hundred different ways -- many of them brilliantly. While watching special features on Toy Story 2 I heard a similar comment about Tom Hanks. What does this have to do with software you might ask? In both cases the directors said they had a hard time choosing the preformance they put into the movie. They had a wealth of riches to choose from and they made great films. In software we often try to do it with one preformance -- the first cut of code. Or we try to put all the code in the product.
Internetworld ...usability is not concerned with assigning blame but with defending users and their rights to a pleasant and effective user experience. Users don't care who is to blame for a delay. All they care about is the time they have to spend solving their problem. Also, when considering whether to use WAP today or in the foreseeable future, one has to take into account the network technology that is actually in use around the world.
Jakob Nielsen, "Nielsen on Usability: Testing Tips and Notes on Task Time," Internetworld, 17 Jan 2001.
14 January 2001
Redirect | Invasion of the Usability Experts (Web Techniques, Feb 2001)
Dangers of taking usability "rules" without a grain of salt.
12 January 2001
The pattern is to start modest and improve according to the dictates of the users.
It is far better to have an underfeatured product that is rock solid, fast, and small than one that covers what an expert would consider the complete requirements.
If it has value and becomes popular, there will be pressure to improve it, and over time it will acquire the quality and feature-richness of systems designed another way, but with the added advantage that the features will be those the customers or users want, not those that the developers think they should want.
Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 218, 219, 220.
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"It's relatively cheap to do paintings and drawings. It's expensive to make movies."
"Creating an interface is much like building a house: If you don't get the foundations right, no amount of decorating can fix the resulting structure."
Sam McMillan, "Thinking Smaller at Pixar," Communication Arts, July 2000, p.164-171.
"Creating an interface is much like building a house: If you don't get the foundations right, no amount of decorating can fix the resulting structure."
Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 2000, p. xi.
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