The field of user experience design has roots in human factors and ergonomics, a field that, since the late 1940s, has focused on the interaction between human users, machines, and the contextual environments to design systems that address the user's experience. With the proliferation of workplace computers in the early 1990s, user experience became an important concern for designers. It was Donald Norman, a user experience architect, who coined and brought the term user experience to wider knowledge.
In my career, I have heard the quote “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” when a client or business owner wanted to do something new, often for the sake of doing something new. The full quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson is ““A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” There is a very important distinction there.
Consistency is essential to reducing the cognitive load of your interface – the mental effort required to complete a task. When a design is consistent, every interaction feels smooth and frictionless. When it is too inconsistent, the user must expend unnecessary effort figuring out the interface instead of completing the work.
If you work in the field of User Experience, you have to know about the following resources. I will keep adding to this list.
Krug, S. (2013), Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Berkeley, CA: New Riders
Designing an application is a balance between making it easy to learn and easy to use. Something easy to learn may require additional instructions, work breakdown or examples. Something easy to use, on the other hand, assumes mastery of the domain knowledge an tool, and attempts to streamline the task at hand.
To quote a Japanese proverb, vision without action is a daydream.
I was working on dashboards within a logfile collection last week, when I was challenged how to determine the right components for the dashboard, and had several insights.
An analogy that caught the industry interest recently is a comparison of IT delivery styles with how we treat pets versus cattle.* In a nutshell:
- Pets are owned in small numbers, uniquely named, hand reared and lovingly cared for — they are, by all considerations, members of the family. When they get ill, you nurse them back to health.
- Cattle are owned in large numbers, tagged using a standard system, identical, managed in herds, and bought and sold as a commodity — they are, in effect, food. When one gets ill, you replace it with another one.
Clippy was ahead of his time.
I'll let that sink in.
Clippy, the infamous Microsoft Office assistant, was introduced in November 1996. He was refined three years later, in Microsoft Office 2000. He went into retirement two years later, when he was turned off by default. And he finally departed this digital veil in 2007, when Microsoft Office dismissed him all together.