This link has been bookmarked by 78 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 Mar 2006, by Sérgio Carvalho.
-
06 Jan 12
John David SmithNice examples of why "usability" doesn't account for community adoption.
-
28 Sep 11
-
27 Sep 11
-
23 Jun 11
-
Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.
-
Software used in teams usually fails to take hold, because it requires everyone on the team to change the way they work simultaneously, something which anthropologists will tell you is vanishingly unlikely.
-
-
23 Dec 10
-
20 Oct 10
-
19 Jul 10
Simone Economo"Over the next decade, I expect that software companies will hire people trained as anthropologists and ethnographers to work on social interface design. Instead of building usability labs, they'll go out into the field and write ethnographies. And hopefu
social-interface design socialsoftware usability user-interface ui culture anthropology ethnography 5-stars for:andreagandino for:craiv for:onino for:dreamquest for:eliacontini for:presentday for:ukinomao
-
20 Jun 10
-
17 Mar 10
-
But there's a scary element of truth to it—scary to UI professionals, at least: an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn't do anything anybody wants, it will flop.
-
Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.
No, it doesn't work 100% of the time. It works 95% of the time, and it reduces the problems you'll have twenty-fold. Like everything else in sociology, it's a fuzzy heuristic.
-
Software used in teams usually fails to take hold, because it requires everyone on the team to change the way they work simultaneously, something which anthropologists will tell you is vanishingly unlikely. For that reason FogBugz has lots of design decisions which make it useful even for a single person on a team, and lots of design features which encourage it to spread to other members of the team gradually until everyone is using it.
-
-
29 Mar 09
prasanth mLet me give you an example of social interface design.
Suppose your user does something they shouldn't have done.
Good usability design says that you should tell them what they did wrong, and tell them how to correct it. Usability consultants are marketing this under the brand name "Defensive Design." -
14 Mar 09
-
26 Apr 08
-
28 Feb 08
-
04 Sep 07
-
18 Aug 07
-
29 Jun 07
-
30 Dec 06
-
15 Jun 06
-
05 Apr 06
-
04 Apr 06
Miriam Verburgarticle on scial software and usabilty quotes dbpyds article
-
20 Mar 06
-
15 Mar 06
-
24 Jun 05
-
22 Apr 05
-
02 Mar 05
-
12 Jan 05
-
29 Nov 04
-
... an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn't do anything anybody wants, it will flop. ... I'll go out on a limb and say that there is not a single content-based website online that would gain even one dollar in revenue by improving usability, because content-based websites (by which I mean, websites that are not also applications) are already so damn usable. ... When you're writing software that mediates between people, after you get the usability right, you have to get the social interface right. And the social interface is more important. The best UI in the world won't save software with an awkward social interface. ... let's look at a successful social interface. Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls."
-
... an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit. And an application can be the easiest thing in the world to use, but if it doesn't do anything anybody wants, it will flop. ... I'll go out on a limb and say that there is not a single content-based website online that would gain even one dollar in revenue by improving usability, because content-based websites (by which I mean, websites that are not also applications) are already so damn usable. ... When you're writing software that mediates between people, after you get the usability right, you have to get the social interface right. And the social interface is more important. The best UI in the world won't save software with an awkward social interface. ... let's look at a successful social interface. Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls."
-
-
05 Nov 04
Robyn KaldaThe next level of software design issues, after you've got the UI right: designing the social interface.
-
03 Oct 04
-
23 Sep 04
-
But there's a scary element of truth to it—scary to UI professionals, at least: an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hi
-
-
22 Sep 04
-
20 Sep 04
-
Now, let's look at a successful social interface. Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.
-
-
13 Sep 04
-
-
11 Sep 04
-
Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.
-
Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.
-
Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.
-
-
10 Sep 04
-
Michael GilesGreat article from Joel Spolsky on social interface design.
-
09 Sep 04
-
My goal today is not to whine about how usability is not important... usability is important at the margins, and there a lots of examples where bad usability kills people in small planes, creates famine and pestilence, etc. My goal today is to talk about the next level of software design issues, after you've got the UI right: designing the social interface.
-
-
Are Halland"Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail."
-
08 Sep 04
Fogday StudiosWhereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.
-
-
My goal today is to talk about the next level of software design issues, after you've got the UI right: designing the social interface. I need to explain that, I guess. Software in the 1980s, when usability was "invented," was all about computer-human interaction. A lot of software still is. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that's about human-human interaction.
-
-
-
And yet, Napster was the most popular software application on Earth. In an early version of the manuscript, I actually wrote something like "this just goes to show you that usability ain't all that important," which was an odd thing to be writing in a book about usability. I was sort of relieved when the typesetter announced that I had to shorten that paragraph. So I deleted the sentence.
-
-
-
My goal today is not to whine about how usability is not important... usability is important at the margins, and there a lots of examples where bad usability kills people in small planes, creates famine and pestilence, etc. My goal today is to talk about the next level of software design issues, after you've got the UI right: designing the social interface. I need to explain that, I guess. Software in the 1980s, when usability was "invented," was all about computer-human interaction. A lot of software still is. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that's about human-human interaction. Discussion groups. Social networking. Online classifieds. Oh, and, uh, email. It's all software that mediates between people, not between the human and the computer. When you're writing software that mediates between people, after you get the usability right, you have to get the social interface right. And the social interface is more important. The best UI in the world won't save software with an awkward social interface.
-
-
07 Sep 04
korantengdesigning interfaces for social software
-
Bill AndersonFinally, some refreshing commentary on the human and social nature of work.
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.