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> My personal theory on the resurgence of usability? It's the Apple
> effect. Companies tend to look at the big players and ask "What are
> they doing that we aren't?" And Apple puts a lot of though into their
> design. People like their products because they're easy to use.
Interestingly, Apple is going the other way with its latest release of OS X ("Lion", or 10.7).
In many ways, OS X Lion is less easy to use than its predecessor ('Snow Leopard', or 10.6), and suffers from some basic usability design errors. These include the removal of coloured icons, inconsistent file and folder management systems, and the inability to tailor various system features to individual workflows.
Apple's latest design philosophy in Mac OS X is that 'easy to use' means 'use it this way and no other'. So for the first time ever, as far as I can recall, you have an OS X release where even basic users are flooding the forums and blogs asking for hacks to make the system work the way they need it to (in previous releases, all the calls for hacks were from the geeks like myself who wanted to do weird stuff!). But here I'm talking about basic things like 'how to stop the system starting up showing all the documents I was working on when I shutdown?' (if you don't know already, this is the intended behaviour in Lion, and its disastrous for many, not only from a usability perspective but also from a security one).
Anyway, I could write you an essay, but I'm already rather off topic!
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