Usability Quote of the Day

May 23, 2012

There's something very odd going on here. If designers made completely unrealistic assumptions about the physical world when designing technology, then we would blame them (and likely sue them) for technical incompetence. Yet when they make grossly unrealistic assumptions about human nature... we don't blame the designers, we blame the unfortunate people who are just trying to do what the design requires. -- Kim Vicente, The Human Factor, p. 45.    (via interaction-design.org)

Friday, November 04, 2005

Accessibility Begets Usability

Accessibility and usability for Office 12 ...

"I saw the following post as a comment below a news article on Office 12: "with its fancy skin, it appears Office has abandoned low-vision users forever."

Nothing could be further from the truth. We have accessibility experts within every team in Office, including in the user experience team. As the microsoft.com page on Section 508 says, "Section 508 reinforces the best practices that our organization already performs." That's absolutely true. However, our focus on accessibility goes beyond making the software available to more people. It is my opinion that most work done to support accessibility concerns results in better overall usability for everyone using the product.

The most obvious example is keyboard navigation. Because some people cannot use a mouse, everything in Office must be accessible with the keyboard. But a good design here also benefits expert users who choose not to use the mouse for efficiency reasons. Accessibility begets usability."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 12 Interface - User Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Ergonomics

Office 12 Interface.

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