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Designing Social Interfaces

Usability Engineering | September 22, 2004 | 2 comments

We couldn’t possibly be taken seriously as the “Home of Software Engineers” if we didn’t cover at least one of Joel Spolsky’s articles in one of our first ten posts. Every heated debate I have had over the past two years concerning software engineering has always ended with the other party yelling out “well Joel Spolsky said X in article Y so I must be right”.

Joel Spolsky in his latest article titled “It’s Not Just Usability” covers what he calls social interface design. Joel defines social interface design by stating:

“Whereas the goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.”

Social usability takes into consideration how people want to work together. Something that most engineers don’t take into consideration because they are more concerned with finding ways to logically put things together. In Joel’s article he covers the differences between a user interface and a social interface and how an application that does not take into consideration the social interface is bound to fail no matter how good the user interface is.

I strongly believe that one of the main reasons why all of the requirements engineering tools I have tried to date I have not adopted is because they don’t take into consideration how not only a requirements engineer works but how the whole process of gathering requirements works. I feel the problems in requirements engineering root more from social then the technical side.

“Social usability will get your software used by people. This might not be important in the cases of intranets or tools that people have no choice but to use but in the case where you want your product to be adopted.”

You can not create software that requires that people change the way they work together. No matter how stupid we think the use is.

Read “It’s Not Just Usability” by Joel Spolsky

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Comments

September 23, 2004 04:39 AM | David Cunningham commented:

Don’t just read the article, get the book! It’s a good read, and will improve your UI design work by providing simple to remember rules, each backed up by 4-6 pages of explanations and commentary.

I just had to be the first person to post on this site, too!

September 23, 2004 04:40 AM | Dave commented:

The link is:

User Interface Design for Programmers

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