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On The Durability Of Usability Guidelines
Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."
Make sure any self-aware military machine, in control of nuclear weapons can play tic-tac-toe against itself.
Usability guides are too hard to read.
rewriting history since 2109
Wow.... we could have Windows applications that are as reliable and usable as nuclear weapons.
Better than the other way around, I suppose.
As a person who designs user interfaces, I'd have to say that, while those usability guidelines are in fact dated, they're still quite useful as the general concept carries on. There's certain guidelines that, although related to older technology, are still relevant, much like iterative software development developed in the 1970s is still relevant today.
On another note, doesn't anyone find it ironic that the section508 government website doesn't even conform to the same accessibility guidelines it lists?
Cheers, James Carr
In some cases you might need the second guideline:
If it breaks, shake it a little.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Article summary: nothing important changed. Film at 11.