It's Not Just Usability

Another guy who screamed “Nonsense” when hearing about eBay Wrong, wrong, wrong, but at least I was not alone

Via Usability & Social Interfaces. It’s Not Just Usability is about usability to being the major focus in the field of human-human interaction. A lot of sotware is still about human-computer interaction. But the Internet brings us a new kind of software: software that’s about human-human interaction (software that mediates between people). The best UI in the world won’t save software with an awkward socila interface. Other quotes:

“With social interface engineering, you have to look at sociology and anthropology”

“Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.”

“Software used in teams usually fails to take hold, because it requires everyone on the team to change the way they work simultaneously, something which anthropologists will tell you is vanishingly unlikely”

“Ergonomics experts knew a lot about the right height for a desk, but they didn’t know how to design GUIs for file systems”

“Over the next decade, I expect that software companies will hire people trained as anthropologists and ethnographers to work on social interface design. Instead of building usability labs, they’ll go out into the field and write ethnographies.”