Usability is child's play

If a child can do it, everyone can. Some good design tips ...

"Almost every programmer, analyst and designer thinks that user interface design is a piece of cake. This is almost true: designing a poor user interface is easy; designing a good one is much trickier. To see why, you can look at something as simple as a child’s mechanical toy.

In our house a favourite object is the toy cash till, which looks like this: (image below)

Even if you present users with an instruction manual it’s likely to go unread, at least before they use it for the first time. The poor users then have to guess what happens when they do X, and somehow relate this to what they actually want to do (which usually isn’t to explore your program). As learning the program isn’t what they actually want to do (unlike e.g. write a letter) they probably won’t be keen to devote a lot of time to it. Add to this physical problems like response times (has it crashed?) and limited screen resolution and eyesight, and it gets quite tricky."   continued ...   (Via Thinking About Computers)