For a few months in the late 1990s or thereabouts I followed the newsgroup on usability, and man, was that an embarassment! A man named Craig Finseth would chauvinize about the usability of Emacs, and the rest of the group was completely cowed by Finseth’s folderol. In sharp contrast to the rest of the comp hierarchy, this newsgroup has almost exactly zero technical content.
I have read Bruce Tognazzini’s blog and learned one or two or three very valuable things from it. Also, the designers of Plan 9 particularly Rob Pike and maybe Russ Cox know very valuable things about usability.
I have read Raskin’s competent and valuable Humane Interface. I seem to recall Raskin understood math well enough to create original highly technical new math (about airfoils if I recall correctly) and Humane does have math in it, but what I am proposing represents at least two orders of magnitude “more” math about usability than Humane has in it.
I read along on the blog of Matthew P. Thomas when he was just starting his career of improving the usability of the Linux platform. I think Matthew works for the company that makes Ubuntu now.
To be continued.
The title of this blog entry refers to a mathematical theory of usability, but a more accurate description of what I want is a mathematical theory of user delight. Again, I tend to believe after Paul Graham that user delight can usually easily be converted into income.
Tags: software industry