It is an old analysis, but still a good one, The Cost of Frustration:
“While it’s hard to measure whether a design is poor or not, we can easily measure when frustration occurs. With a little digging, we can usually associate a dollar cost to the frustration, thereby giving us a way to estimate, in financial terms, the cost of the poor design.”
Esther Derby has some advice about site (or application) navigation:
“Design global navigation last. Before designing global navigation, design screens with only local navigation–how people do the work of that screen. Then, as parts of the system are ready to release, create an application map that shows hub and spoke relationships, selection screens, modal screens and links and build just enough global navigation for the current feature set.”
I like the idea. Seems like it would generate more a more natural organization in the tool instead of a lot of artificial constructs used to categorize and sort the functionality ahead of time.
Jared Spool interviews Ginny Redish in the SpoolCast: The Web as a Conversation. She says:
“The file cabinate is the wrong metaphors for your web site. The right one is a a telephone, because it is all about having a conversation.”
This really changes how you approach generating content for a site when you think of it this way, and is one I wish more big companies embraced. She has some rather remarkable credentials too, so you might want to listen. According to her site: ”In 1985, Ginny set up one of the first independent usability test laboratories in North America where she and her colleagues had users come to try out interfaces and documentation for clients including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SAP, and Sony.”
Nice.
I like to think I’m a smart guy and am able to handle new things, but I’m with Steven F on the Office 2010 interface:
“This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.”
[via Daring Fireball, via Lifehacker]
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