Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson

Usability and simplicity

Great user experience (UX) is difficult to achieve but often so simple - improvements can be blindingly obvious afterwards.

The Windows Vista UX guide, gives the example of the Spelling and Grammar checking dialog, it was "powerful" but a "powerful and simple" in-place design is even better.





But simplicity isn't simple, what is the 80/20 percent of your software application that your users actually use everyday?

Look at these examples of badly thought-out charts illustrating quantitative information.

If you need some ideas for visualizations methods, this periodic table has some good examples.



Jakob Nielsen talks about Return on investment for Usability.

Long Zheng, of IStartedSomething, points to the updated Windows Vista UX Guidelines on MSDN.



Including guidelines on warning messages and suggestions on how to avoid, "Users are more likely to focus on getting rid of the warning than fixing the underlying problem".



Also we are starting to see information on "Designing with Windows Presentation Foundation", touching on animation being appropriate, aesthetically pleasing often in a subtle way.

How Pragmatic Architecture can be applied to user interfaces and segmenting UI fundamentals into five parts: style, implementation, perspectives, cardinality and locality.

I'll talk in a future post about my thoughts on WPF and UX.