I like his view on how interfaces should be self-revealing.
I used to feel dumb and waste time trying to figure things out, but then I decided that if I wouldn't get something quickly enough, that's because it was badly presented, and I had better discard it and move on. This approach saved me both much ego and time.
(This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious.
I also use it when I design: I keep reworking things until they feel as easy to grasp as possible, and then only I can start to really build on top of them.)
> This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious.
As an interaction designer I cannot stress how right you are about this and that it is no joke at all. There's a seven-year old comment here on HN[0] that really drove home the importance of looking beyond the tech-savvy bubble that we live in for me:
> I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me come online on Skype, so she called me. There's an ocean between us currently. She said she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't find the Send button, so didn't know how to send it. Either it made her feel stupid or frustrated, or she felt so sad that she couldn't send an email to me that she had spent some time writing, or whatever, but she started crying. She was crying because she couldn't find the Send button in gmail.
It's fine to be proud of our ability to navigate technology, but to let that become a form of gatekeeping due to carelessness is terrible. Whenever I'm designing something now I try to think of my retired parents and wonder "will they be confused by this?" as a basic smell-test. If an interface makes my users feel intimidated rather than empowered, I have failed as a designer.
Eh, I run Linux on my laptop so my first association with entitled users are fellow Linux users who hate each and every kind of change to Gnome, KDE or whatnot, not my parents, aunts and uncless who express genuine frustration about being left behind.
Especially because a lot of interface changes that confuse the latter group are really, really hard to justify beyond "fashion", while genuinely causing problems for them, whereas with the former group it's often an annoyance that they know how to work around that is nevertheless blown up to epic proportions, like Sayre's Law in action but for the graphic design of an interface.
If I could find their email address, I'd send a copy of this post to the ... (designers??) over at Thunderbird. Its UI is the biggest mess I've seen since MS added ribbons to Word.
I used to feel dumb and waste time trying to figure things out, but then I decided that if I wouldn't get something quickly enough, that's because it was badly presented, and I had better discard it and move on. This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious. I also use it when I design: I keep reworking things until they feel as easy to grasp as possible, and then only I can start to really build on top of them.)