Donnerstag, 31. Mai 2007
Thema: Informationsarchitektur
How important is the text of an application, for example in a dialogue box, for the usability and therefore the success of the application?
Enormously!
This fact is often beeing underestimated.
Often the text is written by programmers "along the way" while programming the functionality.
In her article "Dialogue boxes making simple things simple", Leisa Reichelt points out a nice example of a bad dialogue box text.
I think, everybody has seen bad examples of dialogue boxes like this one.
From the point of view of a software company, I have made similar experiences during application development - dialogue box texts completely not helpful to the user.
Luckily, I am in charge of improving this :-)
That's why we started to specify dialog boxes including texts before the get programmed. Wireframes also include dialogue boxes that are called from them.
I also like to ask if the dialogue box is necessary at all. Every dialogue box forces the user to think about something he may not be aware of.
Instead, we want the application to support the user thinking in his way.
An interesting thought though - what to do with experienced users? Scott Sehlhorst puts up some ideas about beginners and experts and the Canyon of Pain.
Enormously!
This fact is often beeing underestimated.
Often the text is written by programmers "along the way" while programming the functionality.
In her article "Dialogue boxes making simple things simple", Leisa Reichelt points out a nice example of a bad dialogue box text.
I think, everybody has seen bad examples of dialogue boxes like this one.
From the point of view of a software company, I have made similar experiences during application development - dialogue box texts completely not helpful to the user.
Luckily, I am in charge of improving this :-)
That's why we started to specify dialog boxes including texts before the get programmed. Wireframes also include dialogue boxes that are called from them.
I also like to ask if the dialogue box is necessary at all. Every dialogue box forces the user to think about something he may not be aware of.
Instead, we want the application to support the user thinking in his way.
An interesting thought though - what to do with experienced users? Scott Sehlhorst puts up some ideas about beginners and experts and the Canyon of Pain.
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