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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.
I studied Useability at University in the late 80s/early 90s. One of the key elements was the on-going battle between WILI and KISS.
WILI means "Well I Like It" and is normally for those interfaces designed, built and initially used by one person or group.
KISS means "Keep It Simple Stupid"
There are many other rules, reachability etc but under-pinning them all is the concept that WILI is bad and KISS is good.
The Web was a whole bunch of WILIes ignoring 30 years of interface design. I'm not stunned at all that lessons from 20 years ago are still valid, because people are still the same and interactivity is still the same. Mainframes are very similar to the web as it tends to be a modal interaction model (click......wait......read.....click.... etc etc etc) there are some different concepts when elements are being dynamically updated and adjusting based on context and input. Most of that research is 20+ years old as well though.
WILI v KISS, its the battle of "art" v "HCI". HCI is a discipline that takes in ergonomics, psychology and computing, and produces the best engineering. "art" or "creative interfaces" are the equivalent of a chocolate teapot, it doesn't matter if you like it... its still rubbish.
The best interface is the one you don't notice, it just does its job and enables you to get on.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.
i sino/rules.html
Obligatory linkage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elv
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The fact that I get my work done faster using a command-line 95% of the time, and manipulate GUI elements using conventions established in the 80s around the X11 project suggest that computers haven't gotten that much easier to use. In fact, in their rush to become more usable for the uninitiated, I think they become harder for experienced people to use.
When I sit down at Windows or Mac, my productivity drops. Eventually it comes to a total standstill because I'm so frustrated that I have to stop and find out how to emulate x-mouse under the workstation I'm in front of today. Or find some alt/ctrl-click window resize equivalent since every laptop has a difficult to control pointing device and positioning it over the exact lip of the edge to drag is pretty troublesome. Or look for some xkill equivalent and realize that most systems don't have one and that I really do have to wait for this sluggish application to decide to respond.
I'm still trying to figure out how to make MacOS X usable since everyone sits me in front of it expecting me to enjoy it more because it's "UNIX underneath, somewhere". Then I spend a few minutes to try to remember where to find Terminal and then spend another 10 minutes trying to adjust the colors/font settings so that it's white on black and not 6pt font. I've been doing it for about 4 years now so I figured I'd be an expert on it, but I never can seem to remember. Maybe it's because one day Apple decided to improve it and moved the widgets around and I haven't been able to make any sense of it since. I usually give up and go to a different computer or suffer with the terminal as-is, hoping that I get my work done before I go blind. At least when I can't figure out how to make gnome-terminal or kterm do what I want, I can ALT-CTRL-F1 and get the virtual console which is usually a heavenly 80x25.
Also, apparantly no one but me feels that MacOS X's interface is too slow, even on really really powerful machines.
Complaints that no one understands. *sigh*