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Regardless of what the book says, anyone too close to the product during its development will have difficulty designing it appropriately for the user. If you k
by justin_oaks 4y ago
Regardless of what the book says, anyone too close to the product during its development will have difficulty designing it appropriately for the user.
If you know how the product works then you already have a mental model of interacting with it. That mental model is NOT the same as the user will have, and thus an engineer will think that something is obvious even though it is not obvious to the user.
The same goes with anyone else who is close to it during the development.
You need outside users to make it clear how people new to a product can understand and interact with it.
Unless you're an engineer who can forget everything they know about their own product, you shouldn't try to design everything yourself with no outside feedback.
- marcosdumay 4y agoThat's correct, and the designer is too close to the product too. That is the correct message, and the one every article about design should push. Neither the engineers nor the designers can design a product in a vacuum. Those are both old books that do not deny this message, but focus on less relevant subjects, and have less than clear advice. We shouldn't recommend those books for people without previous knowledge on UX design, because they will be harmful. Besides, given that Nielsen was himself a very important voice on the creation of the modern user-focused design, there is very likely a newer book from him to recommend instead (I stopped reading his books and started reading his papers at the time of the change, so I don't know one).