Usability problems abound – not only on the web but everywhere. Jakob Nielsen has a good piece about navigation aids in cars and remote controls. ¹
I can personally identify with remote control issues. I like to listen to music when I go to bed. Most of the time I’m using the remote control, it’s essentially dark in my room. And there not many positions I am willing to memorize on my remote control. The **sleep** button is one of them. But sometimes I also want to find **stop**, **next** or **previous**! But guess what? I need to find the light switch first. One simple solution would be to put the five most important buttons on a row by itself, a row that you can find in total darkness. Those I might be able to memorize.
And if they’d be willing to hire me, I’m sure I could spend a few more minutes on this in order to help them improve usability by another 2000%. 😄
The same goes for personal experience in mobile phones. I asked arround. All my friends recommended I buy Nokia because they are the “easiest to use.” And I did. And I never looked back. In fact I once tried to send a text message using a Motorola mobile phone and gave up after a few minutes. Hell!
UI design is becoming a big problem apparently. I read an article here ² that talks about how it might be a good idea to get web people to create UIs since they work on this kind of thing a lot. I’ve recently been working on a web based tool and the number of problems that crop up is amazing. – NoufalIbrahim
#Usability