The Acid Usability Test

re: The Acid Usability Test

Woo Seok Seo — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 03:26:00 GMT

GUI sites is great!!!!! ;-)

re: The Acid Usability Test

Woo Seok Seo — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 04:16:00 GMT

If I want to be a member of your team, what should I do?

re: The Acid Usability Test

Kartik Agaram — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 05:53:00 GMT

I've probably checked out a whole bunch out there (as many as scoble?), but I currently have just 30 blogs on my aggregator. Now you're on it. <tongue-in-cheek>Congratulations.</tongue-in-cheek>

re: The Acid Usability Test

Chris Pratley — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 19:57:00 GMT

If you'd like to work on OneNote, you can apply to Microsoft and specify that. We tend to have a full team because we're a popular place to work though.

re: The Acid Usability Test

rick — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 04:45:00 GMT

I've enjoyed your posts about OneNote so far and look forward to whatever else you offer up.

Your mention in this post of "optimization for first use" in particular reminded me of Carl Franklin's post (url below) a short while ago where he pondered development of UI Layers that would provide access to more features, content, and complexity as the user progresses in use of an application. His focus was on availablity of design tools for implementing such an approach and think that absolutely merits some thought.

It seems to me that implementation of this concept would allow truly excellent new applications like OneNote to get us started with first use optimization and either guide us gradually to features we haven't used or possibly be aware of the types of actions we're taking and offer to show us features that might be related.

http://weblogs.asp.net/cfranklin/archive/2003/12/06/41636.aspx

re: The Acid Usability Test

Chris Pratley — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 05:37:00 GMT

Reminds me of Mac Word 4.0 There was a "beginner" and an "expert" mode for menus. People were confused by this, and thought the app had lost features from version 3. Even those who understood what was going on switched to expert soon enough because they needed some feature or other that was only on the expert menus. I am not sure that limiting visible features does all that much to help people understand an application - people are quite good at skipping over things they don't understand - you don't gain that much by hiding them. The way we solve this now is to provide a UI that lets beginners succeed, but also provide ways to tweak the behavior (options), shortcuts, and other direct ways to let people who know what they are doing succeed. There is no ideal solution for any design problem however - only optimizations. As I tell my team, "designing is deciding who gets screwed".

re: The Acid Usability Test

Peter Torr — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 21:09:00 GMT

Design meetings a f-u-n. We also have a lot of laughs over in Visual Studio... and then feel the agony of those usability tests. Oh, the pain. Make it stop!

Mac Word Notes View and OneNote

Buggin' My Life Away — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 00:19:00 GMT

Mac Word Notes View and OneNote

Buggin' My Life Away — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 00:19:00 GMT

Mac Word Notes View and OneNote

Buggin' My Life Away — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 18:47:00 GMT

Clippy and User Experiences

Chris_Pratley's WebLog — Thu, 06 May 2004 06:30:00 GMT

Microsoft OneNote Usability Test

The Software Engineering Student — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 07:10:00 GMT

Web Usability Test is costly

Web Usability Consultant — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 06:52:00 GMT

Usability is very costly because it always need to involve an enough number of people. Therefore, our team is studying an automatic usability approach, including the consideration of information architecture on the system design. The approach will be different from what Melody Ivory did before.