Posting Date: July 11, 2002

User Empowerment and the Fun Factor (useit.com) -- "We need much better methods for testing enjoyable aspects of user interfaces. Such methods should be both robust and easy to apply, since people with relatively little expertise do the vast majority of user testing in the world. That said, ease of use must remain our first priority. Technology is just too difficult for us to abandon this goal. But hopefully it will soon be time to emphasize joy of use as well."

Reader Comments...

I was really happy to read Jakob Nielsen writing about "joy of use" as an important element in web design. Don Norman has probably had good influence on his colleague.
What bothers me is that Nielsen tries to find ways to measure "joy of use". He really, really, really doesn't appreciate things that haven't been proven with statistical evidence and it feels obvious that there are lots of joyful designs that can't (shan't?) be measured.

Posted by: Rikard Linde on July 11, 2002 12:30 PM

It's already happened:

Alertbox scores 1.7 on the Joy Index

Posted by: Mac on July 12, 2002 04:48 AM

That is hilarious!

Posted by: Ryan on July 12, 2002 10:49 AM

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