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February 2004 - Posts

Friday, February 27, 2004 3:29 PM

Joel Spolsky on programming language usability

A colleague forwarded me this link to Joel Spolsky's blog posting on API and programming language usability: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1822&ixReplies=8
Posted by stevencl | 1 Comments
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Friday, February 27, 2004 3:27 PM

Using the cognitive dimensions - API Elaboration

API elaboration describes the extent to which a developer can and must extend the API in order to achieve some goal. This post describes how to measure the extent to which your API meets the needs of your customers in terms of elaboration. For each goal
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Friday, February 27, 2004 3:10 PM

Usability and prototypes

It's been a while since I last posted and the main reason for my silence has been that I've been busy preparing and running a usability study this week which involved the creation of an HTML prototype to mock up the UI of the product we were studying.
Posted by stevencl | 2 Comments
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Friday, February 13, 2004 12:13 PM

API Penetrability

A recent usability study highlighted some issues related to API penetrability (you'll find a posting from my colleague who ran the study here ). Penetrability refers to the extent to which the developer using an API needs to understand some (or all) of
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004 2:30 PM

Using the Cognitive Dimensions - API Elaboration

This dimension provides a measure of the extent to which developers must and can extend the API in order to accomplish a given task. As before, the first step in measuring this dimension is to do a task analysis of the main scenarios that your users will
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Tuesday, February 03, 2004 9:22 AM

Using the Cognitive Dimensions - Penetrability

Penetrability refers to the extent to which a developer must understand the underlying implementation details of an API and the extent to which the developer is able to understand those details. For example, an API that is basically a very thin wrapper
Posted by stevencl | 7 Comments
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Monday, February 02, 2004 11:28 AM

Premature commitment in action

I just finished up an API usability study, during which one of the issues that came up was due to the API suffering from premature commitment (see one of my earlier postings on what this is). In the API we looked at last week, users could create certain
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