The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering
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The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering
If this isn't catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don't know what is.
Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses
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The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering
If this isn't catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don't know what is.
Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses
@osnews This is my academic field (as in, I literally have a PhD in it) and I believe you are 100% correct in the last paragraph @thomholwerda.
We can trace from the 1980s to the 2010s how usability engineering and then UX was assimilated by the bean counters. In the era of usability lab tests, you'd invite people over, watch them use your software, and carefully take note of mistakes and stumbling blocks, mood shifts, things that work but only kinda, etc.
Holistic work. Difficult to KPI-ify.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@osnews This is my academic field (as in, I literally have a PhD in it) and I believe you are 100% correct in the last paragraph @thomholwerda.
We can trace from the 1980s to the 2010s how usability engineering and then UX was assimilated by the bean counters. In the era of usability lab tests, you'd invite people over, watch them use your software, and carefully take note of mistakes and stumbling blocks, mood shifts, things that work but only kinda, etc.
Holistic work. Difficult to KPI-ify.
@osnews @thomholwerda Then with widespread internet and web apps came the reign of analytics. No contact between designers and users allowed. All that's looked at is the numbers. The only feedback channel people have, is leaving.
Does the added newsletter popup increase subscriptions by 3.8% while only causing 0.9% of people to leave? A rousing success! Do people hate it? Don't know, don't care.
And this is why ~all websites are shit now: everything inexorably trends towards barely tolerable.
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@osnews @thomholwerda Then with widespread internet and web apps came the reign of analytics. No contact between designers and users allowed. All that's looked at is the numbers. The only feedback channel people have, is leaving.
Does the added newsletter popup increase subscriptions by 3.8% while only causing 0.9% of people to leave? A rousing success! Do people hate it? Don't know, don't care.
And this is why ~all websites are shit now: everything inexorably trends towards barely tolerable.
@julian @osnews @thomholwerda I don't like it when science confirms something I hoped was just me being pessimistic. 🥲
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@julian @osnews @thomholwerda I don't like it when science confirms something I hoped was just me being pessimistic. 🥲
@mahryekuh Then, in the interest of science communication, let me use this opportunity to provide some further reading for anyone interested.
Thanks to the @ACM digital library going open access, Paul Dourish's “User Experience as Legitimacy Trap” from 2019 is now available to the public: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3358908
A good start for a deeper dive!
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
