Matt Legend Gemmell – World Usability Day

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World Usability Day

Happy World Usability Day, and all that.

Whilst I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about having dedicated days for causes (Talk Like A Pirate Day notwithstanding, of course), usability is critically important and if these events can raise awareness of the need to design for usability right from the start, then more power to all the participants (including our very own Neil, no less).

On an only-vaguely-related note, the recent Mac OS X 10.4.3 update really improves Spotlight performance for me. Typing an app’s name results in it coming up instantly, and I’m no longer experiencing that annoying phenomenon where items appear in the results but it takes a few seconds to show their custom icons. Kudos to Apple for the update.

3 Comments

Keith Instone
3 November 2005 @ 3pm

How did you know we modeled World Usability Day exactly after “Talk like a pirate day”? It does make it hard to conduct usability tests with that accent, but it is worth it. (^:

Neil
4 November 2005 @ 1am

Yes I spent a wonder two hours in a “Usability Factory” in Edinburgh watching a fat man sweating profusely while evaluating the flyglobespan.com website (totaly pish) and then watching people attempt to use screen readers.

The most interesting bit was watching people using iTunes to import a CD then put the track onto an iPod and then talking to the guy running the evaluations about his results. It turns out that only 10% of people use the Search box in the top right to look for a song, even when it’s only one and they know the title! Most people didn’t even notice it. People also had a hell of a time trying to work out how to transfer just one track onto an iPod… I didn’t even realise you COULD drag and drop songs onto the iPod icon in iTunes.

Got two free beers and an afternoon off though ;)

Chris Miller
5 November 2005 @ 5am

Neil, in my opinion dragging and dropping is in essence what Mac software is all about, if I can’t drag it somewhere (with a nice red icon over the clip of what I’m dragging telling me how many elements I’m dragging) I don’t want to know about it!