Smart thinking from Lukas Mathis, as usual. A good rule of thumb.

Lukas Mathis' take on Stripes, a conceptual operating system's user interface.

«Hoekman makes a number of great points on how to improve usability test, and how usability tests can have other advantages. However, his final conclusion ignores exactly why some of the teams in the comparative usability tests performed so poorly. They performed poorly not because usability testing can’t «identify problems and point a team in the right direction», but because the teams that performed poorly made horrible mistakes in their tests.»

«We, the people who design software, must keep in mind that we are not designing for an art gallery. Simply creating beautiful things is just not good enough. We are designing products that will be used by humans who want to reach specific goals. We can’t just make stuff up and hope that it’s good enough. We need to do usability tests, we need to make sure our products are accessible, we need to make sure users can actually reach their goals. Statistical analysis is just one of the tools at our disposal.»

"A mode is a user-changeable state that influences how a computer reacts to user input. For example, if the Caps Lock key is active, all letters typed by the user appear in upper case. If it is not active, letters appear in lower case. Whether Caps Lock is active or not is not immediately obvious to the user, which often causes people to accidentally activate Caps Lock. This, in turn, causes unexpected results when users start to type."

"I started writing this particular game even before I got accepted into the iPhone developer program, simply to get acquainted with iPhone development. It ran just fine in the simulator, but when I put it on an actual iPhone, I was able to get about two frames per second. There was no way to salvage my code; i had to rewrite the game, making entirely different assumptions about the iPhone’s performance."

Thoughts on mousing, menus, and usability.