My recent affair with usability brought me to analyze a somewhat subtle aspect of software, especially the user interface design aspect.

A lot of software is developed thinking that users of the application have experience working with a computer¹. In turn, the systems we design may not be as intuitive as we believe them to be, specifically because we make those assumptions. I have explained things that seemed obvious to me to friends, yet I have never thought it was their fault for “not getting it”. It seems far more a problem of engineers designing (great) systems for other engineers than anything else. One other reason why technology is failing us.

Designing systems for people that do not use a computer² is not easy. In my example, we had a usability professional with us. She did not care much about the development side of things and it was far better that way. She understood who the average users of the system were, what their expertise was in, and what the hurdles they would face when looking at that particular dialog would be. So she helped us focus our ideas in that direction.

The point to take home is that good, general systems³ only happen when you understand that, for many, that system is just a tool they need to perform some task. Look at a pencil. Add a notebook. You have a pure system, one that can produce incredible feats, not despite its simplicity but because of it. Heavy systems do not appeal to the user’s intelligence. They are only artificial barriers between the user and the produce they are trying to get at.

1. Basic browsing and e-mail just scratch the surface, so I would not consider them all that relevant [↩]
2. Certain kinds of applications are exempt: it is nice to have a simple IDE but some knowledge of computers is expected by virtue of the subject matter [↩]
3. Here we can do away with computer parallelism, for I believe this can be applied to more general fields and subject matters [↩]