Usability Evangelists: The old school

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• Donald Norman
• Jakob Nielsen
• Bruce Tognazzini
• Jef Raskin
• Alan Cooper
• Deborah Mayhew

Donald Norman

Donald Norman is professor emeritus at the University of San Diego and was a user experience architect for Apple for many years. In the field of cognitive psychology, Don Norman is well known for his work on action errors and control processes. In 1986 he wrote "Attention to action: Willed and automatic control of behavior" with Tim Shallice (In R. J. Davidson, G. E. Schwartz, & D. Shapiro (Eds.), Consciousness and self-regulation, New York: Plenum), one of the most cited works on control processes. If you have a burning desire to read one of his academic papers, I recommend "Categorization of action slips". The paper was published in 1981 on Psychological Review, which is a very serious (ok, boring...) academic journal, but it's really really funny and enlightning.

In 1988, Don Norman published The design of everyday things, aka The psychology of everyday things (POET). For me and for many others, POET was the first introduction to usability. In Norman's opinion, many action errors are the consequence of faulty design that don't take in account how human cognition works and how we interact with the world. So, if you have ever had problems with doors that open in the wrong direction, faucets acting in mysterious ways, or hostile electronic devices, Norman reassures you that it is probably not your fault. It may be just bad design.

"Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans--from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools--must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed."

If you want to know what Don Norman is doing now, you can visit his web page, as well as the page of his company, the Nielsen-Norman group, which he founded with Jakob Nielsen.

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Jakob Nielsen

For some Jakob Nielsen is the most influencial usability guru; for others, his emphasis on guidelines and discount usability methods has done more damage than good to the field. For sure, the world of usability has a love-hate relationship with Jakob (for one of many examples of making fun of him see the dancing Jacob Nielsen). Nobody can deny that he is smart, insanely successful, has been in the field for a long time, and knows how to communicate.

Jakob Nielsen was the usability lead for Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb), including the original SunWeb design in 1994. Before that, he worked at Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), at the Technical University of Denmark, and at the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

Jakob Nielsen has a bi-weekly column on Web Usability, Alertbox. Everybody in the field reads Alertbox, either to follow its suggestions or to criticize it. Jakob's vision of web usability has been distilled in a recent book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity.

Jakob Nielsens is the author of many other books, among which the classic Usability Engineering. This book was written in 1994 but it is still a good tool for software usability.

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Bruce Tognazzini

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini is the prototype of a usability evangelist. He worked at Apple for 14 years, where he founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple's Human Interface Evangelist. He also worked at Sun and at Healtheon/WebMD. Currently, Tog works with Jakob Nielsen and Don Normal at the Nielsen Norman Group.

Bruce Tognazzini has a monthly column on usability, AskTog. One interesting aspect of this web column is that Tog publishes reader comments, making AskTog a forum more than a site of evangelic teachings.

Bruce Tognazzini is the author of Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design.

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Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin is the most visionary of the UI gurus and is behind some of the most interesting user interface experiments such as Apple's Macintosh, the Canon Cat, and the click-and-drag selection. In his book, The Humane Interface, he promotes radically (and often controversial) new approaches to interaction design based on what we know about human factors and cognitive psychology. He is especially interested in interface efficiency and automaticity (automatic actions are well-learned repetitive actions that we can execute with great efficiency and accuracy).

Raskin claims that human interaction with computers can be reduced to few elementary operations (such as selection, indication, activation, moving, and copying) and that linking those operations to keyboard shortcuts rather than menus would greatly improve efficiency of interfaces. In his vision, software should consist not of self-contained and separated applications but of general-purpose command sets that increase functionality of the interface as a whole.

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Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper is an advocate of User-Centered Design or interaction design rather than a usability evangelist. He thinks that fixing problems with a usability test after the design is finished it's a waste, and it's much better to build the right interface in the first place. According to Alan, this can be done if we know who are we designing for, if we design for goals rather than for tasks or features, and if we design for a specific user rather than for ourselves or for "everybody" (or what he calls the "elastic user"). He advocate the use of "personas" as a tool that helps designing for goals and from the user's point of view.

Alan Cooper is the author of About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (now in its second edition), and the highly recommended The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Alan Cooper is the founder of the design firm named after him (Cooper), and based in San Francisco.

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Deborah Mayhew

Deborah Mayhew is not quite an evangelist, but her work is a good contribution to practical implementation of usability engineering. Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design is a collection of guidelines for developing usable software user interfaces that was written in 1977 but it's still going strong. The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design is a complete and practical guide to usability engineering, with lots of examples, templates, sample work products, and concrete suggestions.

Deborah Mayhew is also the editor of the very famous and often quoted Cost-Justifying Usability. This book examines cost and benefits of usability and quantifies in detail how much money users and companies lose because of bad design.

Finally, the great thing about Deborah Mayhew is that she gives us all a lot of hope on our future quality of life. Guess where her firm (Deborah J. Mayhew & associates) is... In MARTHA'S VINEYARD!!! Aaagggh! Envy...

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