Nicely summarized, Murli. > BTW, one could conceive of such a thing as: > > Design for Unusability -- think security devices: you might want them to be > unusable (by the bad guys). Or is 'unusability' merely a special case of > 'usability' where 'usability' = 0 or a negative value, in a mathematical > sense? <Tongue not entirely outside cheek> >
I'll leave the quantification of it to the mathematicians, but I can think of one such 'unusability' design off the top of my head. The holsters used by most police officers these days are designed to resist someone else pulling the weapon out, which could easily happen in a crowd. Officers are trained in the proper way to release the firearm from the holster, and (by design) it might take the rest of us a while to figure it out if we'd never encountered it before. This gives the officer time to react and deny access to the would-be assailant. Usability for one is not usability for all, and to deny access intentionally is Good Design because that was one of the design criteria. Unusability can be really simple and unintentional, too; you can deny access with something as simple as vocabulary, by writing in engineer-speak or accountant-speak ... or, as we often see, by delivering all content in English even though the intended audience is multinational. Jeff _________________________________________________________________ Get the power of Windows + Web with the new Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_powerofwindows_122007 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
