Linda Eskin's Personal Site

The basics of product design, whether the product is a car or a teacup, boxed software or a web site, a brochure or a manual, are the same. The product should serve the user - make life easier, happier. If it looks cool, that's great, but getting too clever often leads to trouble.

The designer is the user's advocate. A well-designed product will make the user feel smart and capable. If the user is feeling stupid and frustrated, it's the designer's fault.

Ideally, a well-designed product will not require instructions. That's often unrealistic, but it's a goal to aim for in any design. When instructions are required, they should be clear and complete.

Designers need to test their work on novice users. Assuming that people will think they same way you do, and will understand what you meant, doesn't work. A common pitfall is to create a product that's easy for the designers to use, but one has to wonder if they ever asked a new user to try it.

Instruction sheets and manuals should be tested, just like the product itself. From the users' point of view, there is no difference between a bug in the product, and a bug in the manual. If using the product as directed by the documentation doesn't produce the intended results, the customers will be unhappy. Departments can point fingers, but the users don't really care where the problem lies - it just "doesn't work".

There are some excellent and entertaining resources available on user interface design. A couple of my favorites are the book "About Face - The Essentials of User Interface Design" by Alan Cooper (IDG Books, ISBN 1-56884-322-4), and the web site "Web Pages That Suck", and its associated books, by Vincent Flanders.