Fergie's Tech Blog

Having Technical Difficulties: A Brief Treatise on Usability

I would consider this article a very good treatise -- and fatally humorous -- for software developers, designers, and usability "experts" on how to make their wares and products more usable by ordinary, non-technical consumers.

This piece was written by Thomas Sowell, and originally appeared in The Bismarck Tribune (reproduced here via RedOrbit.com) and sums up the situation rather well, but goes to illustrate the frustration a bit further in these paragraphs:

There must be some blind spot that computer engineers have which prevents them from seeing that (1) most people are not computer engineers, (2) there is no point making simple things complicated, and (3) not everyone is looking for a zillion features to have to wade through to do simple things.

Let's start at square one. What is the first thing you want to do with any computerized product? Turn it on.

Why should that be a problem when people were turning things off and on for generations before there were personal computers?

Yet computer engineers seem determined to avoid the very words "off" and "on."

Read the entire article here.

Go ahead -- it's worth a few minutes of your time. While it is a syndicated newspaper column meant to be humorous, it really does strike a chord that needs to be struck occasionally -- especially in the world of technology development.

There are thousands of software usability treatises out there, yet the lesson of Occam's Razor seems lost to a majority of designers.

*sigh*

Enjoy!

- ferg

Image source: Savage Chickens

posted by Fergie @ 1/02/2008 08:56:00 PM