Re: [Usability] Overthinking things.

[Allan Caeg <allancaeg gmail com>]

What's your point and what are you trying to suggest exactly?

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 10:31 +0000, kerberos piestar net wrote:
> There's lots of talk of recording input, technical bug-tracking  
> solutions, and other technical solutions to the apparent usability  
> problem, but can I say I think we are putting the horse miles before  
> the cart here?
> 
> I owned and ran an internet cafe for a few years and basically spent  
> most of every day helping users of all ages, abilities and backgrounds  
> get online, sign up with email, scan things, write documents, all the  
> basic stuff.  This was early-mid 2000's so people were still  
> unfamiliar with the internet as a rule.  It taught me to think like a  
> user, rather than as a geek, and gave me an understanding of UI design  
> since after showing the 100th person how to do something it made me  
> acutely aware of where people (and software) went wrong.  Dumb things  
> I previously had nothing but disdain for such like wizards made my  
> life so much easier.
> 
> There is no point trying to do user focus testing when there has been  
> little to no attention to usability paid so far.  User testing is to  
> confirm that your ideas work (or don't work) and to identify problems,  
> while the current system seems largely to me to have grown out of  
> necessity and lacks any cohesive ideas in the first place - it's more  
> of a developer plaything than a user-centric designed system.
> 
> Plus the users comments are largely worthless anyhow.  Seeing where  
> they are going wrong is the important bit, but it is a bit redundant  
> if most good usability experts can spot it without them and come up  
> with good solutions in the process.  Ideally on a lot of projects what  
> is required is going back to the start, considering each feature and  
> asking 'is this the best that can be done here'.  Only once you  
> yourself are happy with it should the users be set upon it.
> 
> I think there is an affinity for trying to find a technical solution  
> (in the form of trackers, testing and stats) to what is essentially a  
> human problem with (unfortunatley) no correct answers.
> 
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