Joel on Usability


(More random gleanings...)

Joel on Software writes recently:

But there's a scary element of truth to it—scary to UI professionals, at least: an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn't do anything anybody wants, it will flop.

Obviously "pathetically unusable" didn't apply to PG in its heyday...and the various successor projects have yet to do anything generally useful, but it's something to keep in mind.

Wiffle waffle, the lag-induced scrambled egg mind spins on....

Comments

Ron-

Joel Sporssky (or whatever his last name is [Spolsky]) is correct. Why do you think Windows is successful? It does the minimum of what most people want, but is unusable. Yet Windows users will defend it to the death.

I'm in the "make it usable" camp. I want to purchase software and be able to use most of its features without ever opening its manual. This is something that we can do with our IDE. By choosing meaningful icons, and having a context-sensitive help system that goes beyond a list of available methods, externals, constants and persistents, we can help new users learn the language easier. The next step is a "smart" system that can do refactoring, code quality checks to automatically improve code, or watch what the steps that users take and suggest shortcuts or improvements (e.g., if the user keeps repeating certain steps, suggest creating a macro to do those steps and set it up).

-Scott

That bit about automatic macro suggestion/creation sounds good...but it's a long ways down the road, no? First we need to get something up and running.... <wry g>

Posted: Thu - September 30, 2004 at 07:26 AM           |

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