A really good article on software usability

Les hlhowell at pacbell.net
Fri Jan 5 21:06:47 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 18:32 +0000, Scott van Looy wrote:
> Today William Case did spake thusly:
> 
> > Anne, if I may take the liberty of whole heartedly agreeing with you
> >
> > Les's proposal sounds like a MicroSoft proposal.
> 
> In an ideal world, you'd create an application dummy. Get prospective 
> users to use it in various scenarios (UAT). Watch them. Take that feedback 
> on board, develop a sensible set of defaults, then develop a way (user 
> prefs or something) to override all those defaults. Then do another UAT 
> cycle, clean up any issues discovered, and that's it. Voila, best of 
> both worlds.
> 
> This is how software *should* be developed. Programmers all too frequently 
> forget that they are servicing the user, not telling them what to do.
> 
Hi, Scott,
	Maybe I've been lucky, but all the software projects I have been
involved in worked quite similar too this.  I have never just set out to
code something just hoping someone would like and and use it.  I can't
speak for others.

	How do you think all this stuff gets created?

Regards,
Les H




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