Don Norman at Business of Software 2009

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Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.

Which button do you press?

Now, spend five minutes watching this video of Don Norman speaking at Business of Software 2009:

The whole video’s over an hour long, but in the first five minutes you’ll learn:

• Why half of people would press up, why half would press down, and why everybody thinks their choice is utterly obvious.
• Why you have to design products for how your customers are, and not how you want them to be.
• Why making your product usable, understandable and emotionally satisfying are never your goals. They are never sufficient. And they’re not always necessary.

Didn’t watch the five minutes? I didn’t think so. You’re busy. You’ve got meetings to hold, e-mails to read, tweets to write. Five minutes is a looong time.

Those are lousy reasons.

Five minutes *isn’t* a long time. And even if I’m wrong and you did watch five minutes, I bet you didn’t watch the whole video. I didn’t. For all I know, the editor accidentally spliced porn in at minute 34. Like you, I’m just too busy to spend an hour watching it.

But we should have watched it and, deep down, we know that. If you’d watched the whole hour, you would be able to create better software. You’d have learned new things, you’d have had been entertained, and you’d be – just possibly – a better person because of it.

Here’s a second chance. Go and watch the video.

…

I thought not. Again, you’re just too busy. But if you spend all your time on the here-and-now and the urgent, you’ll never have time to do the important and the interesting.

Which is why you should carve some time out of your schedule and come to Business of Software 2010. You need to create a bubble away from your routine meetings, e-mailing, coding, and hiring and firing. Spend two and a half days talking with 300 of your peers, and listening to wonderful people like Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Dharmesh Shah, Peldi Guilizzoni and Eric Ries.

The early bird discount expires on July 2nd. One hundred and twenty five people have already booked. I hope you can join us in October, in Boston. Visit the Business of Software conference web site to find out more and book your place.

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Comments

[Alexander Pas]

Now, ask the same question, only with left/right, and everyone (who reads from left to right) will answer right.

With volume buttons it is very clear (up/right).

The most fun appications od the up/down confusion is in DTV sets, where you press down for the next channel, when in the menu, yet press up for the next channel when in full screen (sigh)

the solution would be, to layout the buttons like this:

- left = previous = channel/slide
- up = higher = volume
- right = next = channel/slide
- down = lower = volume

sadly, the 4dir volume/channel is done wrong for so long, it is not fixable anymore.