According to usability industry leader Jakob Nielsen, usability failures in software and apps are usually because the software:
- solves the wrong problem.
- has the wrong functions for the right problem.
- makes the right functions too complicated to understand.
Nielsen’s last point reminds me of what a product manager once told me: many users of highly specialised software think of themselves as experts, but only few of them actually are. He believed elaborate sets of functions are too numerous or complex to learn fully. As user researchers and interface designers we can help solve that.
Continue reading “A complicated interface is fixable”