“The Usability Body of Knowledge (BoK) project is dedicated to creating a living reference that represents the collective knowledge of the usability profession.”
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I am still in Amsterdam, In my hotel room and tomorrow I’ll get back to Portugal. But not before I write some thoughts about this city.
Bicicles in Amsterdam
It’s a nice city, there are a lot of bicicles, and you should be very carefull when crossing the streets or you can cause an accident – bicicles have priority over cars, people… everything.
The city itself has a nice architectural feeling around the water canals (grachts, as they call it here).
But there’s one thing I didn´t like at all:
Everything is paid. Well, this is not a surprise but every monument will ask for an overrated ammount. The city has around 50 museums.
Woth it:
Not worth it:
Ok, that’s it. Tomorrow I’ll fly back to Portugal..
…a little after the Turkish airlines plane crash…
Start spending it, those days had begun.
Happy 2009!
“Teste da Morte” (Death Test), is a famous portuguese web ad that claims that can tell you how much time you have left. Ofcourse, you must provide your mobile phone number and subscribe to some weekly paid-service.
It’s been around for a month or so and everybody has seen it… and complained about it’s boring mouseover-soundsample.
I could not believe that Google was delivering such an anoying flash-based ad.
- F”#$k you Google!
And now the one and only good part:
Sound was removed.
- Thank you google.
Stop adding features. Too much features blur the main purpose of your application.
Complex looking interfaces tend to look great. Take any 3D Modeling application as an example – a lot of buttons and features always look hightech…
…but the truth is: Newer interfaces tend to have fewer buttons, and a cleaner look.
I tried to prove this tendency with an evidence series starting with this post.
Here is evidence number 1:
Space Shuttle versus Space Ship One
Most may think about this like comparing a swiss knife with a fork. Remember, discussion is open if you want.
I think one of the biggest reasons why interfaces are getting simpler and cleaner is that most of the complexity is now kept inside the system, not in the user. Now, computers can handle and evaluate complex scenarios which brings to full-automation a lot of previously man-centered actions.
Thanks for following,
See you on Evidence #2
Usability research is behavior-driven.
The quality data you get from people is:
People’s opinion, should never be considered as input for usability research (you may find some usefull thoughts however).
