Usability Quote of the Day

May 22, 2012

You can blame the 'stupid user' all you want, but you still have to staff those phones with expensive tech-support people if you want to sell or distribute within your company software that hasn't been designed. -- Alan Cooper    (via interaction-design.org)

Friday, January 28, 2005

Functionality Is Dead

The name of the game in the 1990s was functionality and technology. The new game is ease of use and accessibility.

This wasn’t the first time I was wrong about the relative importance of functionality. I made such a mistake in the late 1980s when I believed that software startups Wonderware (shop-floor interface) and Parametric Technology (computer-aided design) would crash and burn because they did not have the requisite functionality needed to do all the jobs their marketing brochures claimed. And while I was correct about their lack of functionality, I was wrong about how an intuitive and almost fun user experience can make up for a lot of functional and technological shortcomings. (Obviously, they didn’t crash and burn.)

Companies should add the following considerations to their application evaluation process:
Be accessible to a wide variety of employees, suppliers, and customers.
Be simple and inexpensive to upgrade and maintain.
Require little training for diverse sets of users.
Coexist with complementary and competitive solutions.

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