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It’s all software that mediates between people, not between the human and the computer. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that’s about human-human interaction.ĭiscussion groups. Software in the 1980s, when usability was “invented,” was all about computer-human interaction. My goal today is to talk about the next level of software design issues, after you’ve got the UI right: designing the social interface. My goal today is not to whine about how usability is not important… usability is important at the margins, and there a lots of examples where bad usability kills people in small planes, creates famine and pestilence, etc. I’ll go out on a limb and say that there is not a single content-based website online that would gain even one dollar in revenue by improving usability, because content-based websites (by which I mean, websites that are not also applications) are already so damn usable. The CNN website has nothing to be gained from a usability consultant. UI consultants are constantly on the defensive, working up improbable ROI formulas about the return on investment clients will get from their $75,000 usability project, precisely because usability is perceived as “optional,” and the scary thing is, in a lot of cases, it is. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn’t do anything anybody wants, it will flop. So I deleted the sentence.īut there’s a scary element of truth to it-scary to UI professionals, at least: an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. I was sort of relieved when the typesetter announced that I had to shorten that paragraph. In an early version of the manuscript, I actually wrote something like “this just goes to show you that usability ain’t all that important,” which was an odd thing to be writing in a book about usability. Due to a principle in usability called affordance, instead of buttons, it really should have had tabs, which was the point I was trying to make.Īnd yet, Napster was the most popular software application on Earth. The main Napster window used buttons to flip between the five screens. In that book, on page 31, I showed an example from what was, at the time, the most popular software application on Earth, Napster. I have a book you can buy for a lot less that tells you some of the principles of designing usable software, but there’s no math involved, and you’ll be out the price of the book. (If the expected value of usability is greater than $122, I guess you make a profit.) Jakob Nielsen has a mathematical formula he’ll reveal to you in exchange for $122 which you can use to calculate the value of usability. For years and years, self-fashioned pundits, like, uh, me, have been nattering endlessly about usability, and how important it is to make software usable.

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