OK all you developers, here's what you should think of when you hear the word "usability".
Get a randomised group of your product's end-users. If your program is for sysadmins you'll want to get sysadmins, and if your program is for novices, get novices.
Set them a series of tasks to perform with your application.
Watch them try and perform these tasks.
Stifle the urge to scream "No, you fool - it's over there" as they fumble around the design that you thought was so brilliant. Instead, take lots of notes.
When it's finished, work out where the common problems are, and then fix them.
Rinse and repeat with a new set of users, until they all get it.
Note that this has nothing to do with arguments such as features vs. simplicity, or GUI vs. CLI, or newbie vs. experienced user. It's just a practical guide to smoothing out your application.
After you've done this with a few apps you'll start to get a sense of how to incorporate good usability from the start, but remember, there's no substitute for testing with real live users.
Most of the comments here seem to be assuming everybody has their "real", "legal" name, and may also have other names that people call them. Legally speaking it's a bit more complex, or at least more fluid.
Legally, your name is whatever people generally call you. There is no official register of names - such a thing would be impossible anyway. The only way to prove that your name is what you say it is is to show evidence that other people call you that name. The best evidence is official documents, such as a passport, drivers license, etc. If you are the sort of person who has no such official documents, you need people who can vouch that they call you by your supposed name.
If you want to change your name, most governments have mechanisms that allow you to end up with a document that formally indicates that you wish to be known by your new name. However this new bit of evidence about your name doesn't necessarily trump all the existing evidence for your old name. You gotta get all those old documents (passport, driving license, SS, etc.) changed to the new name quickly, or else it won't "take".
You seem to assume that when somebody speaks to you in a non-English language that they are either (a) expecting you to know their language, or (b) demanding that you learn their language.
I don't think either of these assumptions is true. They're just trying to communicate the best way they know. If you can't speak their language you could politely say so ("sorry, I don't speak Portugese/French/etc."), or just say nothing.
its more like the persons sitting next to you at the table, begin to try and speak to you in korean, and then expect you to be able to bend over backwards to communicate with them.
No, it's like the people at the table next to you start speaking to you in Korean, and because you don't know Korean you make a complaint to the management of the restaurant. There is no expectation on the English-speakers to bend over backwards, or do anything at all.
But even that analogy isn't quite correct. I think the English speakers are upset because they are creating forums in the hope of developing communities of people they can be a part of, and their forums end up being overtaken by Portugese speakers. And so they are excluded from their very own creation.
...and I receive about 850 spams a day to addresses that have never existed.
Some of these addresses are obviously now on all the spam lists, and these addresses are responsible for about half of the spam. The other half are "dictionary" style attacks with addresses that use common names such as brooks@domain, murray@domain, jones@domain, etc. These spams often come in waves, but in general their proportion of the overall mix is increasing.
The irony is that I got the catch-all domain to help deal with the spam problem, but it has only made it worse. And the real irony is that none of the throwaway addresses I use to register for things have ever been spammed.
in the SQL server market MS went from zero to 30% and seems stuck there. I would predict that the same thing will happen with open source. Open source will have 30% of the office, OS, database markets in a few years.
I think network effects are stronger on the desktop than they are for backoffice databases. A 30% market share for Linux on the desktop would be a highly unstable situation. You'd see most of the remaining 70% quickly switching to Linux because A) it's cheaper, B) there would be a critical mass of compatible hardware, and C) there would be a critical mass of trained people to help support and use it.
People in the states all feel they are equal and won't let themselves feel subservant. Its that sense that, "yes I'm a waitress, I'll get your food, but you're not better than me."
As an Australian who has travelled extensively through both America and northern Europe, I reckon you're exactly wrong. It is Australians, and in particular, British people, who have this "I am equal" attitude, while the Americans are quite willing to act like servile schmucks in the hope of getting a tip.
But Americans are much less shy about expressing themselves to strangers, so a pissed off and angry American is more likely to express this than a typically repressed Australian or Brit.
Service in America is more extreme, whether it be rude and aggressive, or sycophantically smarmy.
I liked this section best, particularly his argument that Amazon is not as vulnerable to competition (say from Walmart) as previously thought due to the way they have managed to incorporate a kind of network effect into their system via all their user contributions to the site. The lesson is to get users to provide value for each other, even if the site's ultimate goal is selling widgets.
And this argument:
It appears that open source is the "natural language" of a networked community. Given enough developers and a network to connect them, open-source-style development behavior emerges.
Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet...So Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network.
But I dunno, maybe these arguments only make sense to the minority of internet users who actually contribute content (if only to sites like Slashdot).
But I have noticed that if I set up a filter to apply the "spam" label to a message, that message still appears in the Inbox and does not appear in the Spam folder, although it does of course appear under the Spam label.
I didn't create a filter, I created a label (called spam). Gmail automagically applied this label to the mail it put in the spam folder. No filters are required.
There's no reason why this should happen, but it does.
And yeah, there is NO INDICATION AT ALL of mail in the spam folder
Create a label called "spam". Anything that gmail filters into the Spam folder will also automatically appear under the "spam" label, which also shows the number of unread messages.
I get over 800 spam a day to my domain, which I now have forwarded to my gmail account.
The gmail spam filter is knocking out about 80% of it. I haven't bothered to check for false positives as it's enough of a hassle getting rid of the approximately 160 spams that get through to my inbox.
Those popfile numbers seem low to me. I've never had less than 99% accuracy (after a couple of days training), and I've been using popfile for over a year, and am on my third corpus.
Right now I'm at 99.92% accuracy. I still get pissed off about the 0.08% though:)
This is the real argument against the use of nuclear power, and I find it totally convincing. It's not just a case of idiots, it's a case of human error in all it's forms. Political interference, greed, or just insane malice may lead to a catastrophic nuclear accident. No systems, whether physical or procedural, can totally guard against this.
Accidents will always happen, but nuclear accidents can be a million times worse than accidents involving other power sources.
It may be wrong of me to sodomize these prisoners with a glow stick, but IMHO what they did to us on 9/11 is more wrong than what I'm doing.
I find it disturbing that your example assumes some sort of link between Iraqi prisoners (mostly common criminals and people unlucky enough to have been swept up at US checkpoints) with the Saudi dudes who crashed the planes into the buildings.
So you're saying that Americans are untaught, and living their lives in a state of nature?
That's bullshit. There is no state of nature. Americans learn a whole bunch of cultural values, just as Japanese people do. The values are different, that's all.
I know this is completely off-topic, but I have to disagree that this sort of behaviour is human nature.
I know for sure that such a system would work fine in Japan (where I currently live). People wouldn't fuck with it, and there would be no vandalism. Therefore it's not human nature, but cultural values that cause this sort of behaviour.
Japan has many examples of public systems that would be impossible in, say, Australia (my home country):
Most trains here have advertisements hanging from the roof in the form of large paper sheets. In Australia they wouldn't last 5 minutes before being torn down or set alight.
Public phones have a phone jack to allow you to plug in a modem - in Australia these would all be filled with chewing gum.
Restaurants deliver food in nice bowls with nice trays, which are meant to be left outside your front door for the restaurant to pick up the next day. In Australia they'd be stolen or vandalised more often than not.
When I was a teenager I indulged in a lot of vandalism and semi-delinquent behaviour, so I'm no stranger to those impulses. But I they're not "human nature".
Congratulations, you've just described a web browser.
The issue is whether web designers use a sufficiently flexible design so that it allows end-users can incorporate their own style-sheets etc. to make the site just right for them.
IOW, one site that can appear in many different ways depending on the browser settings. All modern browsers can already do this.
Elderly people generally can't read small fonts. It's probably their biggest complaint about web sites.
The solution is to use a font size of 1em for your normal text. That way your users will get the font size that they have chosen as their comfortable default.
This is pretty good advice for users of all ages actually.
I live in Japan, and what you say is true. But it's simply because people are super-polite here. They don't have loud converations, cell-phone or otherwise, on trains or buses. It would be rude.
But its a common sight to see people riding a bike while texting or using the internet on their phone.
Analyse your audience. This is probably easy for you - it'll be fellow developers, who probably have a similar level of technical competency and experience to you.
Plan an approach. What type of document will this be? A reference document that is designed to be used when somebody needs to look up a small, highly specific chunk of information? Or a task-based document, that sets out a series of steps to follow in order to achieve an objective? The choice is yours. You may want to do a bit of both, in which case you'll have to decide to what extent you keep the two approaches separate (two different documents, different chapters, different output formats etc.)
Outline, outline, outline. Start writing headings for all the subjects you want to write about. If you use MS Word, the "outline" feature is great for this. At first you might just want to start throwing down these headings without worrying too much about structure. But as they build up you should start to organise them into logical groupings and a hierarchical structure.
It can be helpful to take this to a fairly extreme level where you write a heading for almost every paragraph that you intend writing. You'll probably end up not using all those headings themselves, but the exercise can be a useful form of planning. If you have this level of detail in your outline, when it comes time to actually start writing the text you'll find that the document practically writes itself.
The above advice basically breaks down the documentation task into manageable chunks. I've left out an enormous bunch of stuff, but this should get you started. It also doesn't actually help you make good decisions regarding your audience analysis and document structure. That takes talent, experience, or luck.
Slashdot Mirror
OK all you developers, here's what you should think of when you hear the word "usability".
Get a randomised group of your product's end-users. If your program is for sysadmins you'll want to get sysadmins, and if your program is for novices, get novices.
Set them a series of tasks to perform with your application.
Watch them try and perform these tasks.
Stifle the urge to scream "No, you fool - it's over there" as they fumble around the design that you thought was so brilliant. Instead, take lots of notes.
When it's finished, work out where the common problems are, and then fix them.
Rinse and repeat with a new set of users, until they all get it.
Note that this has nothing to do with arguments such as features vs. simplicity, or GUI vs. CLI, or newbie vs. experienced user. It's just a practical guide to smoothing out your application.
After you've done this with a few apps you'll start to get a sense of how to incorporate good usability from the start, but remember, there's no substitute for testing with real live users.
Most of the comments here seem to be assuming everybody has their "real", "legal" name, and may also have other names that people call them. Legally speaking it's a bit more complex, or at least more fluid.
Legally, your name is whatever people generally call you. There is no official register of names - such a thing would be impossible anyway. The only way to prove that your name is what you say it is is to show evidence that other people call you that name. The best evidence is official documents, such as a passport, drivers license, etc. If you are the sort of person who has no such official documents, you need people who can vouch that they call you by your supposed name.
If you want to change your name, most governments have mechanisms that allow you to end up with a document that formally indicates that you wish to be known by your new name. However this new bit of evidence about your name doesn't necessarily trump all the existing evidence for your old name. You gotta get all those old documents (passport, driving license, SS, etc.) changed to the new name quickly, or else it won't "take".
You seem to assume that when somebody speaks to you in a non-English language that they are either (a) expecting you to know their language, or (b) demanding that you learn their language.
I don't think either of these assumptions is true. They're just trying to communicate the best way they know. If you can't speak their language you could politely say so ("sorry, I don't speak Portugese/French/etc."), or just say nothing.
its more like the persons sitting next to you at the table, begin to try and speak to you in korean, and then expect you to be able to bend over backwards to communicate with them.
No, it's like the people at the table next to you start speaking to you in Korean, and because you don't know Korean you make a complaint to the management of the restaurant. There is no expectation on the English-speakers to bend over backwards, or do anything at all.
But even that analogy isn't quite correct. I think the English speakers are upset because they are creating forums in the hope of developing communities of people they can be a part of, and their forums end up being overtaken by Portugese speakers. And so they are excluded from their very own creation.
...and I receive about 850 spams a day to addresses that have never existed.
Some of these addresses are obviously now on all the spam lists, and these addresses are responsible for about half of the spam. The other half are "dictionary" style attacks with addresses that use common names such as brooks@domain, murray@domain, jones@domain, etc. These spams often come in waves, but in general their proportion of the overall mix is increasing.
The irony is that I got the catch-all domain to help deal with the spam problem, but it has only made it worse. And the real irony is that none of the throwaway addresses I use to register for things have ever been spammed.
Actually, in Japanese ie means "NO!" in a rather abrupt and impolite fashion.
Wrong, "ie" means "house" in Japanese. The impolite word for "no" that you are thinking of is "iie".
in the SQL server market MS went from zero to 30% and seems stuck there. I would predict that the same thing will happen with open source. Open source will have 30% of the office, OS, database markets in a few years.
I think network effects are stronger on the desktop than they are for backoffice databases. A 30% market share for Linux on the desktop would be a highly unstable situation. You'd see most of the remaining 70% quickly switching to Linux because A) it's cheaper, B) there would be a critical mass of compatible hardware, and C) there would be a critical mass of trained people to help support and use it.
People in the states all feel they are equal and won't let themselves feel subservant. Its that sense that, "yes I'm a waitress, I'll get your food, but you're not better than me."
As an Australian who has travelled extensively through both America and northern Europe, I reckon you're exactly wrong. It is Australians, and in particular, British people, who have this "I am equal" attitude, while the Americans are quite willing to act like servile schmucks in the hope of getting a tip.
But Americans are much less shy about expressing themselves to strangers, so a pissed off and angry American is more likely to express this than a typically repressed Australian or Brit.
Service in America is more extreme, whether it be rude and aggressive, or sycophantically smarmy.
I liked this section best, particularly his argument that Amazon is not as vulnerable to competition (say from Walmart) as previously thought due to the way they have managed to incorporate a kind of network effect into their system via all their user contributions to the site. The lesson is to get users to provide value for each other, even if the site's ultimate goal is selling widgets.
And this argument:
seems to refer almost directly to Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law:
But I dunno, maybe these arguments only make sense to the minority of internet users who actually contribute content (if only to sites like Slashdot).
Ah, thanks for this info.
But I have noticed that if I set up a filter to apply the "spam" label to a message, that message still appears in the Inbox and does not appear in the Spam folder, although it does of course appear under the Spam label.
I didn't create a filter, I created a label (called spam). Gmail automagically applied this label to the mail it put in the spam folder. No filters are required.
There's no reason why this should happen, but it does.
And yeah, there is NO INDICATION AT ALL of mail in the spam folder
Create a label called "spam". Anything that gmail filters into the Spam folder will also automatically appear under the "spam" label, which also shows the number of unread messages.
I don't know why this works, but it does.
I get over 800 spam a day to my domain, which I now have forwarded to my gmail account.
The gmail spam filter is knocking out about 80% of it. I haven't bothered to check for false positives as it's enough of a hassle getting rid of the approximately 160 spams that get through to my inbox.
Those popfile numbers seem low to me. I've never had less than 99% accuracy (after a couple of days training), and I've been using popfile for over a year, and am on my third corpus.
Right now I'm at 99.92% accuracy. I still get pissed off about the 0.08% though :)
This is the real argument against the use of nuclear power, and I find it totally convincing. It's not just a case of idiots, it's a case of human error in all it's forms. Political interference, greed, or just insane malice may lead to a catastrophic nuclear accident. No systems, whether physical or procedural, can totally guard against this.
Accidents will always happen, but nuclear accidents can be a million times worse than accidents involving other power sources.
It may be wrong of me to sodomize these prisoners with a glow stick, but IMHO what they did to us on 9/11 is more wrong than what I'm doing.
I find it disturbing that your example assumes some sort of link between Iraqi prisoners (mostly common criminals and people unlucky enough to have been swept up at US checkpoints) with the Saudi dudes who crashed the planes into the buildings.
So you're saying that Americans are untaught, and living their lives in a state of nature?
That's bullshit. There is no state of nature. Americans learn a whole bunch of cultural values, just as Japanese people do. The values are different, that's all.
I know this is completely off-topic, but I have to disagree that this sort of behaviour is human nature.
I know for sure that such a system would work fine in Japan (where I currently live). People wouldn't fuck with it, and there would be no vandalism. Therefore it's not human nature, but cultural values that cause this sort of behaviour.
Japan has many examples of public systems that would be impossible in, say, Australia (my home country):
Most trains here have advertisements hanging from the roof in the form of large paper sheets. In Australia they wouldn't last 5 minutes before being torn down or set alight.
Public phones have a phone jack to allow you to plug in a modem - in Australia these would all be filled with chewing gum.
Restaurants deliver food in nice bowls with nice trays, which are meant to be left outside your front door for the restaurant to pick up the next day. In Australia they'd be stolen or vandalised more often than not.
When I was a teenager I indulged in a lot of vandalism and semi-delinquent behaviour, so I'm no stranger to those impulses. But I they're not "human nature".
OK, deaf/blind, I got mixed up. But as the other poster noted, text to braille is even easier than text to speech.
What happens when we are talking about flash animation with text in it for the blind,
Easy, don't use Flash until it has better accessability built in.
or spoken word for the deaf,
The deaf can use speaking browsers. Just mark up your page honestly, and they'll have no problem.
or a complex interactive game for the parapalegic?
Ridiculous example.
Huh, this is not as simple as making sure that someone can apply their own css.
Actually, it is, as long as the web designer has a bit of nous.
The onus should not be placed on the designer because he does not have to care about .1% of his viewers.
Add up the number of users that have poor eyesight or some form of colour-blindnesss. You're probably getting closer to 30% of users.
Congratulations, you've just described a web browser.
The issue is whether web designers use a sufficiently flexible design so that it allows end-users can incorporate their own style-sheets etc. to make the site just right for them.
IOW, one site that can appear in many different ways depending on the browser settings. All modern browsers can already do this.
Elderly people generally can't read small fonts. It's probably their biggest complaint about web sites.
The solution is to use a font size of 1em for your normal text. That way your users will get the font size that they have chosen as their comfortable default.
This is pretty good advice for users of all ages actually.
I live in Japan, and what you say is true. But it's simply because people are super-polite here. They don't have loud converations, cell-phone or otherwise, on trains or buses. It would be rude.
But its a common sight to see people riding a bike while texting or using the internet on their phone.
Analyse your audience. This is probably easy for you - it'll be fellow developers, who probably have a similar level of technical competency and experience to you.
Plan an approach. What type of document will this be? A reference document that is designed to be used when somebody needs to look up a small, highly specific chunk of information? Or a task-based document, that sets out a series of steps to follow in order to achieve an objective? The choice is yours. You may want to do a bit of both, in which case you'll have to decide to what extent you keep the two approaches separate (two different documents, different chapters, different output formats etc.)
Outline, outline, outline. Start writing headings for all the subjects you want to write about. If you use MS Word, the "outline" feature is great for this. At first you might just want to start throwing down these headings without worrying too much about structure. But as they build up you should start to organise them into logical groupings and a hierarchical structure.
It can be helpful to take this to a fairly extreme level where you write a heading for almost every paragraph that you intend writing. You'll probably end up not using all those headings themselves, but the exercise can be a useful form of planning. If you have this level of detail in your outline, when it comes time to actually start writing the text you'll find that the document practically writes itself.
The above advice basically breaks down the documentation task into manageable chunks. I've left out an enormous bunch of stuff, but this should get you started. It also doesn't actually help you make good decisions regarding your audience analysis and document structure. That takes talent, experience, or luck.
Sure, use CSS! But if you're short of time/expertise, don't reinvent the wheel! Use the W3C Core Styles.
And if none of those style sheets quite tickles your fancy, you can use one as a base to modify.