Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
No I disagree with the highly opinionated first part of your statement. I have no problem believing Apple has usability labs, however I don't think they use them to the full potential. Or perhaps management overrules them and goes with whatever thing they want, which probably happened a lot with Jobs. He had a good business sense, but a lousy understanding of usability.
|
Well, it sure sounds to me like your gripe is that Apple doesn't do things the way you personally think they should.
Apple has been doing UI testing and had usability labs for a long, long time. Since you don't like the way they do things, you hypothesize that it must be because Jobs overruled the usability labs for business reasons. So, unless you actually have some sort of evidence that Jobs did overrule the usability labs for business reasons, the most likely explanation is that the Apple UI is the way it is because of the usability test and it's just not the way you would have done it.
For what it's worth, a lot of the Apple UI dates back to the early days of the Mac, I recently threw away an Apple UI guide from 1990, back when I first started programming Macs. Much of it was still applicable. The design decision to go with a one button mouse drives a lot of the UI decisions.
That's ok. There are a number of aspects of the Apple UI that I would change myself, but a lot of that is that I've gotten use to doing it one way, and want to keep doing it that way.