[link] Delicious Library's awarded developer Wil Shipley about software experience:

"Heuristics are the key to designing programs that work well with humans, that make humans smile. In college computer science classes, we learn all about b*trees and linked lists and sorting algorithms and a ton of crap that I honestly have never, ever used, in 25 years of professional programming. (Except hash tables. Learn those. You'll use them!)

What I do write – every day, every hour – are heuristics that try to understand and intuit what the user is telling me, without her having to learn my language.

The field of computer interaction is still in its infancy. Computers are too hard to use, they require us to waste our brains learning too many things that aren't REAL knowledge, they're just stupid computer conventions."

[link] "Winning is not about working hard. It's about working smart… and less. As the French know well."

[link] "KeyCue helps you to use your Mac OS X applications more effectively by displaying a concise table of all currently available menu shortcuts."

Interesting shareware. Worth a try.

★ Brandon Walkin, author of brilliant visual designs of Capo and Billings, shares some techniques for reducing UI complexity :

"Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it."

Note that all wrong design examples are from Microsoft.

★ Mozilla's Aza shares the quality test used for Ubiquity :

"Thus our test: We ask ourselves, “Would I be willing to teach my Grandma how to use this over the phone?”. If the answer is “Definitely”, we know we’re doing well; if the answer is “Maybe”, we know we can do better; and if the answer is “No”, then it’s often time to rethink the whole thing."

I wouldn't even think of designing a piece of software if the end user had to go through all these steps. I always say that if my little sister, my father and my grandfather need to call me for technical support, that product is not well designed. Nobody ever had to call someone else about the Wii or TextEdit.

(Also, within every single text field in every application on Macintosh, you click on a red-underlined word to correct spelling mistakes. Why would somebody design it differently? Oh yeah, right, for cross-platform stuff…)

★ Alex Payne write about software and hardware minimalism in both computer and phone domains :

"Trust comes, in part, from simplicity. When something is simple, it’s possible to understand it in fullness. When you understand a thing, you can trust it."