One of my constant heartaches when I see design proposals, or worse finished features, is the lack of thought given to the poor end-user. This isn’t a new subject indeed there are currently some insightful blogs from Microsoft employees complaining about the interfaces in some of their own products – Windows Media player springs to mind. With this in mind I thought I’d blog some quotes from ‘About Face 2.0 – The Essentials of Interaction Design’, please read the book but to whet your appetites…
‘…marketing departments are sometimes able to provide requirements, but these often have little to do with what users actually need and have more to do with following the competition, providing feature checklists to IT departments, or guessing based on user surveys or customer wish lists. None of these approaches take into account the users’ goals in any systematic fashion.’
‘…marketing departments are sometimes able to provide requirements, but these often have little to do with what users actually need and have more to do with following the competition, providing feature checklists to IT departments, or guessing based on user surveys or customer wish lists. None of these approaches take into account the users’ goals in any systematic fashion.’
‘…Developers…centring on technology and engineering methodology…Marketing departments focus on what drives press attention, on features lists, on what people say they will buy…The result…software that irritates, reduces productivity and fails to meet the user needs.’
I’ll stop there, if you want to read more then buy the book! But please all you developers and software houses out there, please think about the poor end-user. Take a long hard look at what you’ve developed or are developing and ask yourself honestly, are you making software that thrills or irritates the user?
IT Bytes 