*Donald Norman may be a curmudgeon, but he's the thinking man's curmudgeon.
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/gestural_interfaces_a_step_backwards_in_usability_1.html
"...some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab.
"After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best practices, the more likely they are to fail. Sometimes, a radical idea turns out to be a brilliant radical breakthrough. Those designs should indeed ship, but note that radical breakthroughs are extremely rare in any discipline. Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.
"There are several important fundamental principles of interaction design that are completely independent of technology:
"· Visibility (also called perceived affordances or signifiers)
"· Feedback
"· Consistency (also known as standards)
"· Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)
"· Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus
"· Scalability. The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.
"· Reliability. Operations should work. Period. And events should not happen randomly.
"All these are rapidly disappearing from the toolkit of designers, aided, we must emphasize, but the weird design guidelines issued by Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
"What are we talking about? Let us explain...."
