BY alvaro.varona
“Usability is not about technology, it is about how people understand and use things. While technology often changes quickly, people change very slowly .” This was the categorical statement made by Steve Krug when presenting the updated edition of his famous book from 2000, “Don’t Make Me Think” (Anaya Multimedia, 2014).
When I recommend this book in my classes, which is one of the reference manuals for user experience professionals, many students ask me if it makes sense to read something written 20 years ago to design the digital interfaces of the present and the future. They doubt whether all the recommendations on usability and digital design that Steve france business email database wrote in the year 2000, when there were no smartphones or Facebook, are still valid today. I usually talk to them about how important it is to understand the past to be able to design the present and how, even if technology or people change, the design principles must remain.
We live in a world saturated with information. It is said that we receive more than 6,000 advertising impacts a day and we barely retain a couple of dozen of them in our memory. Our attention span is auctioned off to the highest bidder between apps, websites, series, video games... and each one brings out its best weapons to make us prefer them over the others.
In recent years, this phenomenon has been called the “attention economy,” a scarce and economically valuable commodity that is increasingly shared among more interested parties.