Anthony Dunn — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:06:29 GMT

John,

Thank you for the article. Very thought provoking. I couldn’t help but think that a lot of design today is the actually flipping the Turing test on it’s head. Rather than trying to build a computer to sound like a human, we’re trying to encourage humans to sound like computers. Boolean search is a prime example of that. Suggest functions are a more sophisticated form of that.

Another thought as well: with any human interaction, we typically allow for give and take. This seems to go against expectations when dealing with computers. I might ask a human “so what can you tell me about X?” And my interlocutor would respond “I’m not sure what you mean?” To this I would try alternate forms of getting across my idea (using other words, explaining the context, etc.) With computers there seems to be a higher expectation of “give me an answer right away.”

Anthony Dunn — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:42:07 GMT

This is a very timely post, especially since so many projects are increasingly becoming “agile-ish”. One additional point on setting expectations during the Sales & Kickoff phase. I’ve found it’s really important beforehand to get at least semi-commitments from all the stakeholders that something will be done with the results once the usability testing is completed. After all, why bother setting up costly time-consuming tests if a manager is not going to budge from a code freeze date within the next week? Or if there are already plans to re-architect a particular feature and the current UI is just a temporary placeholder. Without setting these kinds of expectations the usability tests become an exercise in frustration for everyone involved.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Anthony Dunn