At the risk of/.ing one of the best sites for free computer science information, you can download the audio for a talk given by Stallman at ArsDigita University where he describes origins and differences between the GNU Operating System and the Linux kernal.
In defference to Stallman, the the talk is distributed in the.ogg format.
If you find this site interesting, please send them a donation to keep it available for others.
I'm not a big fan of Jakob Nielson. (Especially ever since I meet him at CHI2002. Perhaps snubbed would be a better term.)
Still he has contributed a great deal and has an Alert Box article mentioning some of these same usability considerations as related to security. The article dates back to November 2000. Like many other postings here, the article is mainly focused on password policy and use.
Most of these criticisms are not new. These same arguments are presented in the book About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design by Alan Cooper published in 1995. What this article has done is add some additional historical context and technical details. Useful, but not particularly new.
Alan Cooper has more to say about these and other issues of user interface design. And, though you might not always agree, they are at least thought provoking.
Besides the "Thats the way we've always done it argument", there are two other reasons why things have not changed. One, usually software development is not about creating the best solution. Rather, it is typically about creating the "good enough" solution. And two, there is not yet any hard usability data which shows that investing time and money in changes at this level of detail will have an impact significant enough to justify it's cost.
I would really like to see more work done on the latter.
And worst of all, he uses Verdana, an ugly, unreadable font that is not as suitable as Arial, Helvetica and sans-serif for viewing text on computer screens.
I just thought I would point out that Verdana was actually one of the first font faces actually designed for the screen. You can read more here.
One of the primary difficulties faced by HCI within industry is that the field is still ill defined and misunderstood by those who are practitioners of software development. A very common view is that HCI is the study of how to make software that is easy to use for the first time, naïve user. For instance, once comment posted about this story states "...if musical instruments were designed like software, instead of violins and pianos, we'd probably only be getting those electronic children's books that play a melody when you touch different parts on the page. Kind of intuitive and easy, but not exactly very powerful or interesting."
This same misperception that HCI is only about software for naïve users may also explain why it is so well embraced by the major players in enterprise web development and not is other areas such as application software. In the world of web development it is widely accepted that all users are naïve users. (This is partly why HCI practitioners such as Jokob Nielson are able to be so prolific in the area of web software.) However, in application development, the common view is the software is being developed for "expert users" and that catering to the needs of the naïve user through HCI will only dilute the program's capabilities needed by the "experts".
This same attitude is also leads software development teams to think that they can create user interface for naïve users simply by creating a lot of dialog boxes and wizards. (Yuck!)
The fact is that the field of HCI is much broader than this common and simplistic understanding. While HCI does have something important to say about the way applications are designed for the naïve user, this aspect of usability is only one component of HCI. HCI also has a lot to add to the design of software systems to be used by "expert" users.
People such as the ethnographer (Who works to understand how the end user gets their work done.) and the information architect (Who designs user interfaces for information-rich software systems.) are also working within the field of HCI. Their contributions are probably most useful when developing software systems that are not geared towards the naïve user such as Photoshop or even an enterprise application. In these applications it is even more important that the software accommodate the user and fit within the user's normal workflow.
I have put together a short paper giving information about the different roles that are exist in the domain of user interface software and how these roles fit together fit together to form a loose user interface software development process. It is available at http://www.bobowen.org. I also recommend that software development practicioners get and read About Face by Alan Cooper for a better understanding of how user interfaces can be designed without resorting to all these dialog boxes.
The problems for Palm and CE devices so far is the limit of easy to use programming languages which makes it difficult for a novice to write even an basic progam (I don't know C or C++).
I know its unpopular to suggest software based on Microsoft technology, but you might consider that AppForge now lets you write applications for PalmOS devices in the Visual Basic environment. IMHO, VB certainly qualifies as an easy to use programming language. With the newest release, its now easy to set up a conduit with to an ODBC data source as well.
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of /.ing one of the best sites for free computer science information, you can download the audio for a talk given by Stallman at ArsDigita University where he describes origins and differences between the GNU Operating System and the Linux kernal.
.ogg format.
In defference to Stallman, the the talk is distributed in the
If you find this site interesting, please send them a donation to keep it available for others.
I'm not a big fan of Jakob Nielson. (Especially ever since I meet him at CHI2002. Perhaps snubbed would be a better term.)
Still he has contributed a great deal and has an Alert Box article mentioning some of these same usability considerations as related to security. The article dates back to November 2000. Like many other postings here, the article is mainly focused on password policy and use.
The Alert Box Article
Most of these criticisms are not new. These same arguments are presented in the book About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design by Alan Cooper published in 1995. What this article has done is add some additional historical context and technical details. Useful, but not particularly new.
Alan Cooper has more to say about these and other issues of user interface design. And, though you might not always agree, they are at least thought provoking.
Besides the "Thats the way we've always done it argument", there are two other reasons why things have not changed. One, usually software development is not about creating the best solution. Rather, it is typically about creating the "good enough" solution. And two, there is not yet any hard usability data which shows that investing time and money in changes at this level of detail will have an impact significant enough to justify it's cost.
I would really like to see more work done on the latter.
And worst of all, he uses Verdana, an ugly, unreadable font that is not as suitable as Arial, Helvetica and sans-serif for viewing text on computer screens.
I just thought I would point out that Verdana was actually one of the first font faces actually designed for the screen. You can read more here.
One of the primary difficulties faced by HCI within industry is that the field is still ill defined and misunderstood by those who are practitioners of software development. A very common view is that HCI is the study of how to make software that is easy to use for the first time, naïve user. For instance, once comment posted about this story states "...if musical instruments were designed like software, instead of violins and pianos, we'd probably only be getting those electronic children's books that play a melody when you touch different parts on the page. Kind of intuitive and easy, but not exactly very powerful or interesting."
This same misperception that HCI is only about software for naïve users may also explain why it is so well embraced by the major players in enterprise web development and not is other areas such as application software. In the world of web development it is widely accepted that all users are naïve users. (This is partly why HCI practitioners such as Jokob Nielson are able to be so prolific in the area of web software.) However, in application development, the common view is the software is being developed for "expert users" and that catering to the needs of the naïve user through HCI will only dilute the program's capabilities needed by the "experts" .
This same attitude is also leads software development teams to think that they can create user interface for naïve users simply by creating a lot of dialog boxes and wizards. (Yuck!)
The fact is that the field of HCI is much broader than this common and simplistic understanding. While HCI does have something important to say about the way applications are designed for the naïve user, this aspect of usability is only one component of HCI. HCI also has a lot to add to the design of software systems to be used by "expert" users.
People such as the ethnographer (Who works to understand how the end user gets their work done.) and the information architect (Who designs user interfaces for information-rich software systems.) are also working within the field of HCI. Their contributions are probably most useful when developing software systems that are not geared towards the naïve user such as Photoshop or even an enterprise application. In these applications it is even more important that the software accommodate the user and fit within the user's normal workflow.
I have put together a short paper giving information about the different roles that are exist in the domain of user interface software and how these roles fit together fit together to form a loose user interface software development process. It is available at http://www.bobowen.org. I also recommend that software development practicioners get and read About Face by Alan Cooper for a better understanding of how user interfaces can be designed without resorting to all these dialog boxes.
The problems for Palm and CE devices so far is the limit of easy to use programming languages which makes it difficult for a novice to write even an basic progam (I don't know C or C++).
I know its unpopular to suggest software based on Microsoft technology, but you might consider that AppForge now lets you write applications for PalmOS devices in the Visual Basic environment. IMHO, VB certainly qualifies as an easy to use programming language. With the newest release, its now easy to set up a conduit with to an ODBC data source as well.