Orcmid's Lair

Orcmid's Lair

Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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2004-05-23

When Did We Ever Keep It Simple?

ACM News Service: A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple. This is fascinating. The startling statement for me is Media Lab's Walter Bender noting "that he has never seen commercial software that is simpler than its predecessor." John Maeda leads a Simplicity Design Workshop that is digging into how to accomplish simplicity.

A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple. Jessie Scanlon's 2004-05-20 New York Times article includes some great examples and counterexamples of simplicity. The emphasis is on user-centered design. I am not clear how accomodating this turns out to be, based on how easy it is to arrive at something "simple" that is biased to a different agenda than the user's, especially in on-line applications and services.

The examples are great, and we can nod over the anecdotal evidence. What I want to see is how one measures the claimed qualities and what was done to confirm that the product achieved the required measures.
posted by Dennis at 5/23/2004 08:35:59 AM

Comments:

Definitely! And this is where I see using tools and methods like those developed by Tom Gilb being of value.

[OT: how the heck do you trackback on Blogger?]

# posted by Bill Anderson : 5/25/2004 09:12:52 AM

[OT: When the post a comment page comes up on this site, it says the site does not accept anonymous comments, which is hooey. The link is still there and I am using it successfully {I think}. I have to do this because the logon system is apparently overwelmed and I can't wait around. Hmm, and there is no spell-checking service on comment posting. My, my.]

OK, Orcmid here. There is no trackback support on Blogger. I make trackback pings the hard way. After I have posted the article and know what its permalink is, I manually use the SimpleTracks page at http://www.kalsey.com/tools/trackback/ to make the trackback. It was only fun about twice and now I am too lazy. I think I can make an improved page to do it more easily, but I haven't done the work.

One place where this doesn't work is on sites where the trackback ping address must be figured out by autodiscovery from the weblog entry. That I don't have anything for. The Channel9 folk apparently provide for trackbacks this way.

# posted by Anonymous : 5/26/2004 08:09:27 AM