AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, February 19, 2008

Summary:
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.

It’s hard to write a general article about application design mistakes because the very worst mistakes are domain-specific and idiosyncratic. Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem, or (c) make the right features too complicated for users to understand.

Any of these three mistakes will doom your app, and yet I still can’t tell you what to do. What’s the right problem? What are the right features? What complicating curlicues can safely be cut from those features? For each domain and user category, these questions have specific and very different answers.…read more…