waffle

I’ve been playing it for five minutes and so far, yes, it feels like the NES games did. I won’t similarly keep you posted, but I will note that in the modern age, the age of the intra-second Internet, distribution bureaucracy for a solely downloadable game still drags the span from “there” to “here” down to five days (released in the US this Monday; in Europe just now).

Apple now putting App Store rejection letters under NDA.

Because this whole time, the problem was just that we saw the rejections.

I just finished reading Steve Yegge’s great post about Business Requirements — in a nut: if you need to stretch to figure out how the hell this theoretical product should work, if you don’t just know, it’s probably not going to work. I agree completely. To my surprise though, the first comment on this piece from “blasdelf” linked here, and… I’ll just quote that part of it instead:

The recent fracas over ‘usability’ in Open Source Software shows that a lot of hangers-on still don’t get it. The last thing the community needs is more middlemen: affected ‘designers’, managers, marketers.

blasdelf’s comment makes sense, and I can easily see how I can come off as a complete asshole in the linked article. I apologize. Not, as the politician would have it, for that people may read it in that way, i.e. “it’s not my fault”, but really, I’m sorry I didn’t take this angle of it into account.

Allow me to expand on this. I take absolutely no issue with about 99% of the cases blasdelf cites. I don’t care about using such software. It is perfectly fine for software to be intimately obvious to the people the product is for — if it isn’t, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot — even at the cost of “usability practices”, to the extent that they can wreck creative solutions to problems. (An example of this would be if Nokia made an iPhone, and nixed it because there’s no tactile buttons so blind or people with bad eyesight can’t use it, and damn it, accessibility’s important. Another example is batting against command line UIs, by which I mean shell magic, when you’re trying to sell stuff to people that spend their lives in xterm or Putty or Terminal.)

What I’m attacking in those posts is the belief that when such a product for one reason or another is widened in appeal, a reflex from many maintainers is that “making it prettier” is the way to get more people to use it, and that the solution they’re using is optimal for the users they have now, so it better be optimal for everyone else, too. The correct answer is that the product, when narrow in scope or appeal, has been perfectly usable because it’s been obvious for the people who use it how to use it.

I can understand the reaction about “usability” being “marketing”, even if it’s not. People learn that marketing means covering the negatives with filler and shining everything else to a sheen in order to appeal to more people, and adjusting for usability may sometimes mean compromising the interface that’s second-nature for you so that it’s easier to get around for $PERSON_OFF_THE_STREET. From some perspectives, the Usability circle and the Marketing circle are both defined by you and they overlap perfectly on your Venn diagram.

I’m a known friend of the usability wins of the Office 2007 Ribbon. Not the licensing and patents, not the Office file formats and those politics – the Ribbon alone. It does its job very well, but it’s not perfect, it doesn’t scale well down regardless of recent WordPad and Paint screenshots (and a fleet of me-too applications that could probably do with 12 toolbar buttons for their entire app) and it doesn’t yet allow for the caliber of customizability we’re all used to. Many million people who have mastered these applications now have to relearn them. As far as the Ribbon solved the problems that made them investigate in the first place (and they had scientific data backing them in the process), it hasn’t been a raging hit with everyone.

Ultimately, usability is not inherently about taking your precious away. At its best, and driven by people who know a) the product, b) the way things are done now, c) the way things could be done and d) what they’re doing, it’s definitely a net win; it’s the difference between something you can hardly use and something you either love using because it assists you or can be completely indifferent to because it gets out of your way. Those are two different outcomes, and they are both applicable as successes in usability. I’ve forgotten this at times, and, well, waffle regrets the error.