Saturday, January 28, 2006

Developing Usability

I'm helping develop a web browser in what spare time I find. It's surprisingly difficult, because it has to be usable immediately by anyone. No lengthy experimentation, no backtracking - things must work exactly as expected by everyone.

This quickly reveals how different people conceptualise. For example, does a bookmark point to a page, or is it attached the page? What should we do if the user creates a bookmark twice from the same page? If they use the former concept they would expect two bookmarks to be created, and be allowed to edit them. If they use the latter concept they would expect just one bookmark to be created, and would not be allowed to edit it. This is all important for tackling usability, unfortunately.

But all this is minor compared to the usability problems created when I try to apply formal concept analysis to collections of bookmarks. Perhaps I'll explain that one later...

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