[thelist] User perception

Sarah Sweeney mr.sanders at designshift.com
Mon Nov 15 13:49:44 CST 2004


> This reminds me of a talk I went to a few years ago, by Blay Whitby at the
> University of Sussex. His paper looked at the problem-solving methodologies
> that are applied in the investigation of air accidents, and suggests some
> interesting lessons for computer interface design:
> 
>   http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/blayw/flyingl.html
> 
> "Lesson 1 - Blaming the user is always easy and always worthless."

The difference here being that "pilots are very strongly motivated not 
to make mistakes", but Users are not. They are often lazy and/or don't 
pay attention and/or do really dumb things - one would hope pilots would 
not have such lax attitudes towards flying. Unfortunately, we can't 
program our web applications to account for every ridiculous scenario 
that might present itself, and if we tried to do this, we'd most likely 
end up making our applications *less* usable, not more.

-- 
Sarah Sweeney  ::  Web Developer & Programmer
Portfolio  ::  http://sarah.designshift.com
Blog  ::  http://hardedge.ca


More information about the thelist mailing list