Skip to main content

USABILITY, ERGONOMICS AND HCI

 



These three characteristics are key in the IT world. It is good to think about these aspects when developing an IT-related idea. Why? Most of the software that is popular and successful in our society like Windows, Facebook or Google, if you look at it, are developed from these features. Without these, it will be difficult to reach people, which I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a disadvantage in your project.


Let's look at two opposite examples, one that has been successful and a parallel one that has failed, obviously based on usability, ergonomics and human computer interaction.


The example of a bad design, we would talk about Microsoft Bob. 

A graphical environment running on Windows 3.1 or 95 turned the operating system into a room where each piece of furniture represented a different application. In addition, a dog named Rover acted as an assistant and gave users advice. It was a huge failure, partly due to the success of Windows 95 that same year.

As we see in this example, Microsoft wanted to squeeze the most out of the ease of use of their OS, it was a roundabout way to treat users as if they could not learn. There is very little usability, the only people who might be interested in it would be children, but it is not aimed at a wide audience.


On the contrary, as a good example and following in the branch of operating systems we can mention Windows 10 itself. Dedicated mostly to the general public, to the great part of the citizens of the world. With "extensions" for people with various problems, mostly physical problems. Easy to use and an excellent HCI. It does not leave us much freedom to modify it to your liking but if you like it from the start and knowing that almost all your relations use it, as we are sometimes weak to society, we have few options left. But in general it is an excellent OS, made for all kinds of people.


We could conclude that it is quite important to take into account these aspects in your projects or to understand why something is very successful. You always have to take them into account.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THREE INTERESTING IT SOLUTIONS

1980s: Machine Learning Do you know that today's massive algorithms probably know you better than you know of yourself? It all started with Alan Turin saying a famous and interesting phrase in the 1950s: Can machines think? That is when they started to investigate algorithms in which machines could learn by themselves from data. Until a few years later, when an IBM researcher named Arthur Lee Samuel created the first machine learning algorithm in the game of checkers and popularised it among IT researchers. For various reasons, there were about 25 years without any optimal algorithm results and the popularity of machine learning declined considerably, until the 1980s, when the backpropagation algorithm (neural network) was developed. From then on, different algorithms were developed and improved. Until today where machine learning is one of the most used fields collecting massive amounts of data and looking for patterns among them (without privacy) to improve the experience of each...
Post a Comment
Read more

TWO INTERESTING REPLACED AND OBSOLETED TECHNOLOGIES

  PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) The ancestor of the modern mobile phone, a personal digital assistant that offered limited access to many modern capabilities such as Internet access, word processing, touch screen functionality and more. They were very successful in the 1980s. They were programmed using a programming language called BASIC. The suppliers of these, some of them are known today, such as Casio and Acer. In 1995 the market for these grew even more thanks to the company Palm, Inc. They even put RAM and processors in these devices years later. After the 2000s, once smartphones became popular, PDAs quickly became obsolete, but before that time they were a favourite of business people all over the world. FAX (Facsimile) Also sometimes called telefax or telecopy, the humble machine was essentially a modern version of the telegrams. For many years, it allowed individuals and companies to transmit scanned documents. There were different types of transmission: - Cable transmi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cybersecurity in Spain

  Currently, 93% of Spanish citizens use the Internet. This is why new projects are already appearing in order to increase cybersecurity as much as possible. In Spain there are two institutions created for cybersecurity under the name of INCIBE-CERT and CCN-CERT. The first one is focused on companies and citizens and the second one only for the government.  I think it is worth making a separation before analysing security in Spain: before and after the appearance of COVID.  Before the pandemic there was not so much concern about cybersecurity, which has affected us in the state of inferiority that we are currently in compared to the UK or Germany. There were a few projects going on but at the official conferences, most of the companies did not attend, they had their minds set on their own company's profit or other reasons. But what's the point of getting wealth when they can take it away from you in hours through malware. The key to Spain's focus on internet security was ...
Post a Comment
Read more