socialmedian: The secret to designing user-friendly interfaces for desktop software

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The secret to designing user-friendly interfaces for desktop software

Source: Usability In The News

Jul 05, 2008

Summary

Don Norman on user interface design ...

"By the 1990s, user-friendliness had become so ubiquitous in software development that even the fictional programmers in Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs named their two pet hamsters Look and Feel. Although Coupland was confident his readers would get the joke, not all system-building companies understand the full implications of the terms.

While interface designers may be obsessed with how pretty their creations look, it is how users feel at the end of a task that really determines how usable a device is, according to human-computer interaction (HCI) guru Donald Norman.

As professor of computer science at Northwestern University, Chicago, with a long history in computer and user interface design, Norman believes it is the system powering iTunes behind the scenes - and not the iPod's circular touch-and-scroll interface - that makes the system so user-friendly.

"What people often miss about the iPod is that it's not about the device," he says. "Apple did a magnificent job of the entire system, from licensing the music to ...Read the full article

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