Comments on: Glasses in the Kitchen Cabinet: A good analogy?

By: Jared Spool

Jared Spool — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 18:23:39 +0000

Daniel, I'd be willing to guess that browster users would still follow the pattern of choosing what they are going to click on before they move their mouse. It would lose its effectiveness, if that's true.

By: Daniel Szuc

Daniel Szuc — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 02:48:35 +0000

‘Searching for something on a web site isn’t too far distant from the glass-in-the-kitchen hunt.’ – Looks like tools like http://www.browster.com are providing ways to get a sneak preview of a link (allowing users to see through the glass) without having to click on the link.

Although, the user is still required to check the links (so perhaps just another form of pogo sticking?)

By: Tom Davis

Tom Davis — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 17:09:37 +0000

I don’t think it’s a gender issue, per se, unless of course you consider washing dishes to be woman’s work. It’s one of those things that the more a person ‘gets their hands dirty’, the more they understand the problem domain and consequently the more they understand the solution space.

In this case the people who decide where to put glasses are often the glass washers and not merely glass consumers. So this is an excellent analogy, because in a field where the designers are more familiar with the solution space, we are not necessarily going to understand the casual user’s frustrations. Providing windows may not be practical in a home kitchen where 99% of the users are going to be prior users, but on a Web site where 50% of the users are going to be first-timers, the implementers may need to put in a little more work to make the site more transparent to the user.