racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

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.
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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!