Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Portable Usability Labs As User Research Tools

Posted by timothy on from the bookmobile-meets-the-pepsi-challenge dept.

Pete Gordon writes "Do Portable Usability and User Research Labs make sense in the software development life-cycle? This interview (my bias--it's with me, and I have a tool in beta now) covers some of the issues and questions on KDE's news site. I don't have the right answers necessarily, just looking for others input and opinions. Also, here are other links about the subject over the past few months. Info World and Harry's comparison."

1 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cost? by metlin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Short term, yes. Long term, no.

    In the long term, it would be worth it. Hate it as you will, the precise reason Windows does so well in the market is its user interfaces.

    User interfaces play a very very vital role in user behaviour, and usage.

    I do not understand the argument that developers should not have good UIs. Why not? Would you not use a Visual IDE for your development if it had more features that you would use? Or would you rather that we all stick to CLI?

    In fact, I really *like* Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET's IDE -- it's really quite well done, and very well designed with the developer in mind. And guess what? It increases my productivity by a significant amount when I code.

    I'll just say this -- if Linux has to make it big, user interfaces _are_ a big deal.

    There is a HCI maxim that says that the best designs are those that you do not notice -- that is what we should be striving for, Opensource or not. You never know who would be using your Opensource application for what.

    And a good UI design is only going to help it.