Joel on Software

Usability in One Easy Step

“Bad usability in the design of aircraft controls can result in what is cheerfully referred to as CFIT: Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

“The usability of your product may not be quite as critical. If you're lucky, the mistakes you make in usability design will merely cause people to lose limbs, or, heck, even just thumbs. No biggie!”

Read on: Usability in One Easy Step

(You may recognize this article as an extensively rewritten version of beginning of my book UI for Programmers. Indeed, I'm in the process of expanding and revising most of that book, and that's what you're reading here.)

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, enlightened project management software for bug tracking, Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop support easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.