Re: Understanding users & interfaces

At 12:13 PM 4/13/2004, Drew Taylor wrote:

>believe that there are a lot of people who can learn to "program" to some 
>degree.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment Drew, I remember compsci 1.1 at 
Brooklyn College - I took the course because needed science credits, had no 
idea what it'd be about (this was late 70's btw) and knew I was not good at 
the 'hard' sciences.

Anyway, me and two others got easy A's. Most everyone else it seemed had no 
idea what was going on. And it's always struck me that I had no idea what 
problems they could possibly have, no clue why the material presented any 
challenge at all.

Weird, isn't it? Reminds me of a long thread on freebsd chat last year 
about "how geeks drive" and a discussion I had via email with a colleague 
who's an SE guy about how we have had to learn patience with our 
significant others because they just don't plan things out the way we do.

Don't know if this is related, but if it wasn't for programming I'd be 
pretty lame at math. Not that I'm a whiz but am sure I'll be able to help 
my kids with anything they encounter through HS. In my case learned to 
understand math as a side effect of becoming a programmer, before that it 
was hit of miss.

>But quality of code aside, do you think these people are going to design 
>the best interfaces? Or for that matter do you think programmers always 
>create good interfaces? ;-) (referring to myself here). Or would these 
>neophytes actually be good interface designers because they were users for 
>most of their lives?

Y'know, my conviction has always been that anyone who really enjoys the 
work will do well at it.

>Does anyone have usability recommendations they would like to share?

Three - google searches for specific problems and general guidelines will 
yield rich results if you cull, you might want to join the ACM's CHI-WEB 
usability list, it's really interesting imo - and the UI folks really seem 
to enjoy hearing things from a developer's pov; a book I've been very 
slowly working on digesting, an oldie but goodie called "The Mythical 
Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks, he was the project leader for IBM's 
development of the first system 360 OS, predecessor of today's MVS (or 
whatever they're using now, been out of mainframes for a while).

>It's a challenge to put myself in the users shoes and ask myself "So how 
>would I go about doing this task?" That's why I think it's important to 
>actually talk w/ the end users about how they do their day-to-day jobs.

One of the more interesting things I've read on CHI-WEB is that when asking 
users what they like, don't like, find easy, hard etc... and then comparing 
those answers to their observed behavior in performing the tasks they don't 
match up necessarily. IOW someone may say they found feature A very easy 
and feature B very hard but records show they may have done B quickly and A 
slowly.

One of the things I do when developing software in my home office is ask my 
wife and kids and sometimes my kids' friends to try them out when this is 
reasonable and permissible. Then I lean back and watch what they do, where 
they have trouble, and what they enjoy most.

>IMHO, usability experience is a definite step forward to making your 
>resume stand out from the others.

I hadn't even thought of that, a good thought. Not sure how I or if I could 
appropriately put what I do on my resume.

Marty