[dundee] Bad design examples...

[gordon dunlop]

On 29 June 2010 11:11, Axel <newsletter at axelbor.de> wrote:

>
> That's nice. There a to many developers, which forget the user and the
> usability. Software and Devices with a bad usability are annoying.
>
> The book used for the Design for usable interactions module in the MSc. IT
degree was Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. It was
O.K. Tended to be a bit repetitive in the later chapters. They did cover a
few software development models but did not mention an open source
development model, which works differently from proprietary software models.

http://tinyurl.com/preeceetal

I remember during this module studying Sun's Gnome Usability Report 2001,
written by Sun engineer Calum Benson, whereby a number of users,not having
used Gnome before, were put through a variety of tasks and tests and getting
them to mark the usability assessment and to provide comments. I found this
report to have been very informative as user software familiarity,
regardless of whether the software that they use has a good or bad design,
does have an impact on preferences. I have found that this report has been
withdrawn from the Gnome Developers Project Annals page and I cannot find
another link to it (which is a shame). On Calum Bensons's blog there is no
link to it, maybe it is because he is Motherwell supporter :-)

http://blogs.gnome.org/calum/category/usability/

If anyone finds a link to this Sun report please post it.

gordon



> There are a lots of design mistakes in everyday things as well. An
> interesting book about usability is http://tinyurl.com/2b3po56
>
>
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