Joel Spolsky on Usability in One Easy Step
I don’t like to post a link to someone else’s blog or web site without having a good reason. Joel Spolsky of FogCreek Software and the popular Joel on Software web site recently posted about usability. His post goes hand-in-hand with my post about product complexity from yesterday.
Joel has a book out on user interface design and his company's software, FogBugz, has a beautiful user interface that is truly “usable”. I think his post is worth a read.
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Comments
dkappe on on 4.01.2006 at 1:21 PM
Yikes. Know your audience. What if your software has to service two different groups of users with differing expectations? What if you are designing software in a domain where there are no expectations? It begs the question, "whose expectations?" For a more complete disection of where Joel goes wrong, read blogs.pathf.com/.../notsoreat_expec
Rob Bazinet on on 4.02.2006 at 9:48 PM
Yikes! This is a load of garbage. Your view is EXACTLY what is wrong with most software today. You think you need to gather all these use cases and process them to create a document how YOU see the software working.
Too much software is created by people who think they know how the process works by reading a bunch of books by people who can only theorize how users need to be treated.
Joel is right just by your example. Give me a break
dkappe on on 4.06.2006 at 12:26 PM
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I "gather all these use cases and process them to create a document how I see the software working."
For that matter, that sounds so generic -- gather requirements, then synthesize them into a document on how you see the software working -- that it could apply to just about any process, including those advocated by Joel.
Do I read books? Sure I read books, magazines, articles; I listen to fellow software developers; I listen to designers and managers; I listen to users; I reflect on my own 18 years of software development experience -- both successes and failures -- in the hopes of becoming better at delivering good software in a wide variety of domains, on time and on budget. So, guilty as charged.
Just to add a wrinkle: once upon a time I used Solaris and Mac exclusively (Win 3.1 days). The Mac was much easier to use than Windows because it met my expectations. Somewhere along the way I switched. Now I use WinXP and Linux. WinXP is much easier to use than Mac because it meets my expectations. What has changed? Yes, yes, Windows isn't as much of a piece of crap as it used to be, but mostly my expectations have changed. Give me a years using the Mac exclusively and my expectations will have changed again.