Stalk Your User (Web Techniques, June 2001) Technology seldom becomes important until it becomes invisible.

Salon.com Technology | Miles of aisles When Web sites began selling stuff the conventional wisdom was that they might be able to offer bargains, and even make money, but they'd never be able to offer as rich and seductive an experience as a bricks-and-concrete store. Guess what? That wisdom was dead wrong. It's possible to make shopping for books and music online not just a task but a pastime and a devotion. Amazon.com proves it.

Technology Review - The Net Effect: May the Best Interface Win! By making its online store easy to navigate and use, Amazon has created an environment where money is easy to spend.

Michael Schrage, "Beta Version," Technology Marketing, May 1, 2001

Which brings us back to marketing: an inherent tension always exists between complexity and convenience. The folks at Nokia and Motorola quietly—and blushingly—confess that people only use a fraction of the programmed functionality of their cell phones. That's less true of Palms and Visors, but those PDAs represent an unusual marriage of productivity and convenience—with the accent on productivity.
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Alas, it's so much easier to sell convenience than to design it.
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Want a useful metric to evaluate convenience? Consider "Mean time-to-payback"—how long does it take someone to feel like they're getting value from a function. The faster; the better. Architecting the trade-offs between productivity, payback and convenience is what will determine whether people buy phones that are PDAs or PDAs that are phones—or neither, or both.

Fortune.com

A lot of people are working on alternative engines. But this one," he says, patting a silver prototype fastened to a worktable, "has a better chance of succeeding because it is simple. Simple, simple, simple, with only one major moving part, and that means less cost. And there's a big market need."

hypergene | tufte: don't get it original - get it right

Tufte responded with a revelation: “Do no harm,” he said. “Don’t get it original – get it right.” There it was – the Hypocratic oath of design. It hit me hard because it had been staring me in the face all those years. Design is not about vanity, it’s about responsibility, integrity. It’s self-effacing and at it’s best invisible. “Good information displays get people thinking about the information not the design,” Tufte said.

developerWorks : Usability : The usability world according to Tog

• "Effective interfaces are visually apparent and forgiving, instilling in their users a sense of control. Users quickly see the breadth of their options, grasp how to achieve their goals, and do their work.
• "Effective interfaces do not concern the user with the inner workings of the system. Work is carefully and continuously saved, with full option for the user to undo any activity at any time."
• "Effective applications and services perform a maximum of work, while requiring a minimum of information from users."

Internet World Daily News: Nielsen on Usability: Is Usability Really Worth Anything? - 05/01/01 Usability also helps with services that users will pay for. Field research can identify needs that are so important to a person's work or life that a service that meets these needs will offer great value. User-centered design can produce solutions to the needs that are easy to learn and efficient to use and thus unlock the full potential of the service. And traditional Web usability can ensure that a service is described and promoted in such a way that people can understand it and will sign up for it.

HBS Working Knowledge Operations & Technology The most remarkable finding was that getting a low-functionality version of the product into customer's hands at the earliest opportunity improves quality dramatically.