February 2004 - Posts

• Joel Spolsky on programming language usability

  A colleague forwarded me this link to Joel Spolsky's blog posting on API and programming language usability: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1822&ixReplies=8 Read More... Posted Friday, February 27, 2004 3:29 PM by stevencl | 1 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• Using the cognitive dimensions - API Elaboration

  API elaboration describes the extent to which a developer can and must extend the API in order to achieve some goal. This post describes how to measure the extent to which your API meets the needs of your customers in terms of elaboration. For each goal Read More... Posted Friday, February 27, 2004 3:27 PM by stevencl | 0 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• Usability and prototypes

  It's been a while since I last posted and the main reason for my silence has been that I've been busy preparing and running a usability study this week which involved the creation of an HTML prototype to mock up the UI of the product we were studying. Read More... Posted Friday, February 27, 2004 3:10 PM by stevencl | 2 Comments Filed under: Usability

• API Penetrability

  A recent usability study highlighted some issues related to API penetrability (you'll find a posting from my colleague who ran the study here ). Penetrability refers to the extent to which the developer using an API needs to understand some (or all) of Read More... Posted Friday, February 13, 2004 12:13 PM by stevencl | 0 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• Using the Cognitive Dimensions - API Elaboration

  This dimension provides a measure of the extent to which developers must and can extend the API in order to accomplish a given task. As before, the first step in measuring this dimension is to do a task analysis of the main scenarios that your users will Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2004 2:30 PM by stevencl | 0 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• Using the Cognitive Dimensions - Penetrability

  Penetrability refers to the extent to which a developer must understand the underlying implementation details of an API and the extent to which the developer is able to understand those details. For example, an API that is basically a very thin wrapper Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 03, 2004 9:22 AM by stevencl | 7 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• Premature commitment in action

  I just finished up an API usability study, during which one of the issues that came up was due to the API suffering from premature commitment (see one of my earlier postings on what this is). In the API we looked at last week, users could create certain Read More... Posted Monday, February 02, 2004 11:28 AM by stevencl | 1 Comments Filed under: API Usability