Mark Bernstein has some excellent observations on the limits of usability:
Software design is not a matter of avoiding gotcha's. Sure, it's nice to minimize training costs by making it easy for novices to use a system, but training is merely one kind of cost.
There are, of course, other forms of usability, but the minimalist tradition that he attacks is by large still the most popular (by far). I've been worried about the trend toward simple forms of efficiency in interfaces for a long time (a significant chunk of my first book, Nostalgic Angels, criticized the emphasis in many forms of hypertext toward making automatic books). Bernstein also has some great things to say about the role of aesthetics in design, and ends with this:
For extra credit: Take Nielsen's 'Ten Usability Heuristics' and apply them to your favorite school of painting -- e.g. French Impressionism. For extra-extra credit, apply them to Abstract Expressionism. Or, for that matter, apply them to film noir, or to the films of Robert Altman.
The majority of web design is still in its cave-painting age. Which probably sounds like a huge diss to a lot of talented web designers. It's not. (I consider myself only a marginally passable web designer.) I'm only saying that it's going to take some time to evolve—audiences have a lot to do with this. Altman's work probably wouldn't have been appreciated in the 1920s. For that matter, there are a lot of people in our culture that still don't get abstract expressionism. So it's not really about high/low culture divisions, but about appropriate responses to cultural contexts, and how much pushing of the envelope is available to designers at any point in time in any specific location.
[via Mark Bernstein]
Posted by johndanseven at April 19, 2006 06:27 PM