[wp-design] A Quick Sketch

[Matthew Mullenweg]

Joen Asmussen wrote:
> I know you all hate Jakob Nielsen, but his usability writings are based 
> upon measuring thousands of users behaviour in usability labs. "He's 
> just the messenger". And he mentions "Non-Standard Use of GUI Widgets" 
> as his #3 on his top ten web design mistakes:
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html

I think being consistent and making it obvious inputs are inputs is 
important, but Jakob's implementation advice was more relevant 6-8 years 
ago when the studies were done and that article was written.

If anything the expectations have been reversed -- people expect 
applications to work and feel more like web pages now, because their 
entire computer experience is "online."

I do not doubt that there is a type of person who may be confused by an 
input box, but I think we can pretty safely say that they won't be using 
WordPress in the first place. I think most of our usability problems lie 
not in the styling of the form elements, which I've never seen anyone 
have trouble with (though they really sucked in the 0.7-1.0 days) but 
with the intuitiveness and flow of getting tasks done.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com