Erluvi - Web Design

PALO ALTO, Calif. — A panel of experts on “ease of use” whose experience ranges from technology design to behavioral psychology agreed rather ruefully Wednesday (April 4, 2007) one of the most complicated challenges in electronic engineering is simplicity.Their conclusions echoed the irony of one audience member—an attorney with Silicon Valley law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati—who defined “technology” as “something that doesn’t quite work yet.”
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Ease-of-Use Critics: Designers or ‘Feature Creeps’?
David Benjamin, EE Times (04/05/07)
   
[Short Abstract]
A recent “ease of use” forum held in Palo Alto, Calif., brought together experts to debate the merits of engineering for simplicity versus the potential to maximize features. “Every possibility you add to an interface increases your likelihood of failure” in the commercial world, said Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab founder B.J. Fogg. Others agreed that, in interaction design, making a device that everyone can use is far more difficult than making something that only the highly-skilled can use.

Ease of use has become a “grave issue” in engineering, said EE Times editor Junko Yoshida, citing an “SOS from consumers.” Bill Moggridge, author of “Designing Interactions,” a book focusing on complexity and ease of use, said the best way to avoid ease-of-use issues is to build a prototype and test it out on everyday users. In support of complexity, Moggridge called attention to the status workers can achieve through their mastery of intricate devices. “We feel proud that we’ve gotten past a barrier of difficulty,” he said.

The forum then turned its attention to Japan’s I-Mode mobile phone platform, which included watching a video of a consumer spend 30 minutes using their phone’s electronic payment system to buy a can of tea from a vending machine. Yoshida said there is a growing trend toward usability, but Fogg replied that the tendency for designers to believe that “more is more” rarely leads to the “best user experience [being] the initial winner.” Moggridge explained how Web 2.0 concepts could allow users to “go, converse, and manipulate,” without the restrictions of hardware or software that is designed for a specific device.

Read the complete article at EETimes.com