Some good points here, and I wanted to get back to the original concept which was Predictability=Usability blatantly ignores some key tenants from what we should all remember from our HCI and Cog Sci classes - considerations for usability foremost in my mind is cognitive workload of our user. How a good designer's design take into account working memory and design from the perspective that it is a limited resource; it is transient and is limited to capacity and time. It is affected by fatigue, context, motivation, anxiety, pre-formulated mental models, age, the time of day (and the day of the week), technological aptitude, disabilities, tacit domain knowledge, information structure, sensory interference from Dave M's Tweets, tasks, framing, priming, good beer, the Celtics tonight and many other factors that are in the literature. I think the problem is complex but not surmountable - but reductio ad absurdium pronouncements make me wince and contemplate forms of escapism because we should address all those variables when designing and not think that a simple formula like making a system predictable will ipso facto make it usable (simple, enjoyable).
- W On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 9:09 AM, John Vaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Belated comment on this thread: > > "Consistency : Predicatbility : Usability" might be expressed as more of a > Venn diagram? > > Or perhaps more nuanced, with "Expectations" and "Anticipation" somewhere > in the mix. > > I've always felt that the most successfully generous UI's are the ones that > provide a sense of "what's down the road": > * A set of search results that provide some context for the list > * A stepped process that tells you how many pages, questions or minutes are > required > * A sense - not just of opportunities - but of scope > > Always a balancing act, of course. > ________________________________________ > ________________________________________________________________ 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
