Sublime

Livingston: Was it hard designing something for non-technical users? Perlman: It's extremely hard, because you have to design for someone who's not you. After a while, as you develop interfaces and have experience with them, you begin to think with the intuition of a person who does not understand the inner workings of the system. And you also have

Even so, popularity doesn’t equal excellence. A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about. A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making prod

FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them. One of the very few well-documented facts about Web use is that people tend to spend very little time reading most Web pages. Instead, we scan (or skim) them, looking for words or phrases that catch our eye.

Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell’s Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests (Wiley, 2008).

If you’re not going to use an existing Web convention, you need to be sure that what you’re replacing it with either (a) is so clear and self-explanatory that there’s no learning curve—so it’s as good as the convention, or (b) adds so much value that it’s worth a small learning curve.

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web (New Riders Press, 2002), an excellent book by Jesse James Garrett.

Regardless of the product, users should be able to quickly and easily complete the task they had in mind. People are not there to admire the design and shouldn’t even be thinking about the design. Digital products aren’t art galleries—they’re tools. They’re a means to an end for the user on a mission.

As soon as ease of use is held up as the criterion, each of these is seen to be unbalanced, reaching for only half of the true goal.