Today the the great mpt dispenses with this bit of wisdom:
To make software learnable and efficient, you can start by asking a couple of simple questions.We'd all like to make mozilla learnable and efficient as well as pleasurable so let's ask and answer these four questions. We'll start with "learnable and efficient" and then move to "pleasurable".1. What action might someone want to perform?
2. What is the most obvious and efficient interface that can be implemented for triggering this action?[....]
To make software pleasurable, you need to attack the problem in the opposite direction. Examine each action which could be performed on every element in your program.... For each of those, ask:
1. If someone did that, why did she do it?
2. What was she expecting to happen?
So question number one: What actions might someone want to perform? It's clear to me they might want to load up a webpage and use the browser to determine if the page validates according to the World Wide Web Consortium specified Doctype included in the page source. Yes, it positively the case that most users regularly desire this functionality. What user in his right mind wouldn't want to perform this action? Check documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards? You bet. All the time. So we move to question number two. Oh, my mistake. Sorry. Validating a page is a task that exactly 3 users in the world actually want to do. What was I thinking.
