Det mest absurde med Altinn er ikke pengebruk og nedetid, men at du logger deg inn og sliter med å finne selvangivelsen.
Altinn har mye å lære av sine kolleger i Storbritannia, som har lagt noen gode prinsipper til grunn for arbeidet med offentlige digitale tjenester. Og alle punktene har overføringsverdi til alle som jobber med digitale tjenester, som feks. prinsipp nr. 4 «Do the hard work to make it simple». De fleste organisasjoner kan lære av dette:
You shouldn’t have to understand how government works to be able to interact with it. Government and the services it provides are often complicated, so we should hide complexity where possible.
Great design means that one look and the end user reacts by knowing what to do with a knob or a button, without as much as even thinking about it. Of course this knob is what turns the volume up, or brings up the home screen.
This of course factor is at the heart of every great design — from the iPhone to the Braun alarm radio
Fra intervju på design.org: Et par interesante blikk fra en som designer for Android – hvor behovet for høykvalitets design er stort:
I’m not interested in designing an iPhone version. While doubleTwist gets a lot of requests for an iOS version, it’s not the platform that truly needs a ‘design investment’ like this right now. Also, fascinatingly, Android users are much more willing to seek out ‘better’ versions of apps already on their phones.
Og om å ha jobbet for Apple:
I learned countless things at Apple, but the most important skill I acquired was the ability to simply take a set of extremely polished designs—sometimes designs I’d easily consider to be the best I’d made in my life—and throw them away, trash them entirely, and start over. It’s where truly great design is born. Since my time at Apple I’ve done this many, many times, and it has always resulted in incredible progress. You have to learn to kill your babies, mercilessly. They’re just pixels. You can do better.
The underlying attitude here is that users will like the new UI just fine once they try it, but they don’t want to give it a chance because they’re stubborn, like toddlers refusing to try an unfamiliar food.
(…)
The problem with this attitude is that sometimes the users may just be stubborn, but other times the users are encountering a real serious problem with the design; something they can feel is wrong, but can’t quite articulate precisely. Your users aren’t trained as designers, so they may not be able to argue their case convincingly in the language of design. If you dismiss all negative user feedback as mere stubbornness, you’ll miss important warning signs when you’re about to make a mistake.
Han har også en artikkel som er verd å lese, kalt These Things I Believe. Kan være kjekk å bruke om du skal argumentere for brukervennlighet til, eh, tradisjonelle informatikere.
Meeting with Microsoft early in the development process, [Paula] Scher asked: “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?”
Bort med flagget, bort med rødt, grønt, blått og gult. Inn med strengt perspektiv og flate former:
Det er gøy å se at der Windows 7-logoen fulgte tidens estetikk (ev. kopierte Apple) med glass, gloss og lyseffekter, går de sin egen vei med Windows 8. Sentralt ligger konseptet om at Windows 8 skal være «autentisk digitalt». Fra Microsofts egen introduksjon:
It was important that the new logo carries our Metro principle of being “Authentically Digital”. By that, we mean it does not try to emulate faux-industrial design characteristics such as materiality (glass, wood, plastic, etc.).
