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There's a lot of stuff lately on blogs about user experience, and its not just about software. Seems like the days of manufacturers telling you what to do and screwing you around are finally changing; the newcomers (and some old ones) are now chanting the new cool - customer/user experience.
- The Enlightenment of Richard Branson [via goodexperience]
"We should be having fun when we're spending our money...He takes on intransigent industries that treat customers inexplicably
badly and shows that he can offer not only a better deal but a truly
entertaining experience...Putting customers first is hard in a corporate environment that
understands only cost, efficiency, and business as it has always been
done...We were able to borrow $2 billion to buy a new fleet of planes, but not $8 million for seatback videos." - It's the experience, stupid
"I think that's where we were with software as recently as a year ago.
Software did it's job and that's all there was to it. But [as] with the car, people realized that it was as much art as
it was machine. They thought about ways to make the car technologically
better but also more comfortable and user friendly. Make
the experience one that invokes a lot of emotion and makes the end user
passionate. Build the kind of interfaces that people want to set as
their desktop backgrounds. Just as Mercedes can charge a fortune for a
car, sophisticated, pixel perfect applications can command a premium...If your application is easier to use, the people who actually work with
it will be more productive and can spend their time valuably. It starts
with the user experience and we finally have the tools and processes at
our disposal to make UX a big part of the process." - Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design [via barren]
Well worth reading, especially if you're gonna be designing user interfaces.
"Hypothesis 1: Human interface cognitive load is proportional to the number of clicks/keystrokes/gestures"
The more clicks, the harder a task is. Palm had a similar policy when they were designing Palm OS - everything that's commonly used had to be accessible within 3 or so clicks.
"Hypothesis 2: Human interface cognitive load is proportional to interface latency"
The more unresponsive an interface is, the more the user has to concentrate to remember the task, and hence the harder it is for the user to complete the task successfully. As a side-effect, users also get more frustrated, lose patience and press CTRL-ALT-DEL (or Force Quit) to kill the app, unlikely to start over again, especially if the task was tedious and long to begin with.
"Hypothesis 3: The usability of an interface is inversely geometrically proportional to its cognitive load"
The greater the overall cognitive load (perceived difficulty), the less likely the user is gonna perform that task. Which is common sense really, but gets overlooked when you're focused on making it work, and adding features, and when you're the only one using it. - Creating Passionate Users Blog
Great blog that I discovered recently - focuses on software, but some bits apply to all, like the latest post about companies being like bad marriages - how customer relationships become worthless once they've sold you the product. Some more difficult issues are tackled as well, such as striking the balance between treating customers as idiots and removing all control, to providing too much control and forcing the user to RTFM 5 times before being able to use it.