March 10th, 2007
Overheard in the office…
It’s finally weekend, and I want to share this story from the Googleplex with you.
The back-story first, we were talking about various introductory books for user interface design, and somebody brought up Joel Spolsky’s “User Interface Design for Programmers” book, which contains the quote:
“If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms - and nobody would be there.” (page 130)
Which promptly yielded the following response:
“We all know that usability engineers would never design a brightly lit nightclub. You’d do some contextual interviews, learn that no one really wants to see each other in a nightclub because the primary user motivations are getting laid and drinking away depression, so obviously the place would need to be dark.”
Do you need more to convince you that the people working here are awesome?
