It’s the Design, Stupid!
Monday
May 22, 2006
Here’s what I think about designing for usability. Design your product / service / software / website with the stupid person in mind. I assure you then, that your site will be the ultimate in usability!
Of course by design, I do not mean only style, which only pertains to the aesthetic aspects of design. Design is everything about the functionality, aesthetics, and concept behind any creation.
Make things as simple as possble. Make things as usable, intuitive, and uncluttered as possible, with the stupidest of people possible in your mind. That’s unless you’re designing an aircraft control panel–but still, you have to remember that your pilot should be comfortable with controls lest you want him to crash the plane.
…
It takes more effort to design with usability in mind than just putting in all the bells and whistles in one place. For one, you may have to trim down your work reasonably–in some cases, you may have to hold off on that cool feature you’d been working on for months. And in most cases, it boils down to only keeping the basic stuff (or at least reserving/hiding the snazzy stuff only for advanced users to explore). What’s important, after all, is that your creation works the way it’s intended to, and that your user won’t have to read hundreds of pages of instructions to learn how to work things.
I’m of the opinion that if something is well-designed (hopefully elegantly-designed, too), then there should be no reason for the user to RTFM.
Check it out at ForeverGeek. I do hope you usability advocates out there would agree with me on this one!
J. Angelo Racoma is a technology journalist and blogger. See more of his blog posts here at racoma.com.ph, commentaries at racoma.net, and Twitter feed at @jangelo.
Comments
JMX
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:25 pm
J,
well, ur site is ok, and nice, comments on this blog, well, it’s true that the design would sell out if it’s in a good form, i myself is having a bad times with design, though im not a designer, coz im a programmer, sometimes you have to elude the way people think, programmer and interface design doesn’t mix well, hardcore programmers and design artist go hand in hand when working together, but such talents are not in it’s best form when acquired by different people, let’s say a designer may know much of ASP, PHP or Web Development, but he’s bound to loose this tech know how when he’s going deep in the programming. and a programmer is going to loose his savvy when he’s into interface designing, all in all i think people with less knowledge of both should get some bief on stuff like this. and i think with such, you can feel the difference and although it’s not what they focus on, but i think it’s best when they try to learn both.
J. Angelo Racoma
May 24th, 2006 at 2:05 am
JMX,
Thanks. I do think there should be elgance in design with the way a programmer codes. This goes even for non-interface stuff. For instance, it shouldn’t take a hundred lines of code to display “hello world.”
(We have Windows for that kind of stuff.)
fuyozdjeio
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:06 pm
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