On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, Nathan Hurst wrote:
Nestor Diaz Valencia wrote:
Nobody will ever mention how nice designed are those photoshop icons or handy is to have a really really small properties palette flotating in the quarkXpress interface. You are used to something. The usability tests in proffesional apps is a myth. They might do it for consumer apps, but there is not usability test behind maya or the nightmare at 3dstudio, you just need a lot of tools and parameters and the try to fit all of them. Show me a Usability test and I will shut up.
Indeed, Michael Wybrow found that in a certain respected app one of the features they sold as improving usability turned out to be a hinderance in his usability testing! Read his conference paper (where is it again?).
That would be here: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~mjwybrow/ozchi2003-final.pdf
In terms of this discussion I would say the absence of user testing for some of the large popular commercial products is a very good reason to careful about mimicking their interfaces and tools. We should really look to the people who use these products heavily on a day-to-day basis to determine which are the good metaphors and interfaces in particular products.
Cheers, Michael