New York Times columnist David Pogue takes aim at technology’s worst interface-design offenders, and provides encouraging examples of products that get it right. To funny things up, he bursts into song.

He’s highlighting the decline of some manufacturers commitment to user-friendly software. There are vendors that release complicated software to run under Microsoft’s products, and while they are to blame some for the lack of intuitiveness, Microsoft created this user-not-so-friendly foundation..

Calling for simplicity in design is easy. But what appears to be simple from the designer’s perspective may be anything but from the perspective of the player.

About David Pogue: David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy Award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. He’s also one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors,

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system. This is in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T432-Q_CYN4

Separating design team and the test team sometimes helps in getting the more honest and unbiased results. Lot of designers associate there “self” with the design and sometimes try to get positive results by “framing” usability tests.

Usability tests are about users and not designers!