November 8, 2000: Taylor welcomes the "usability backlash" and I tend to agree. On the other hand, it's gonna take something a bit more articulate than this interview with Val Casey (which uses the naive-sounding argument that "users are smarter than you think" to dismiss "usability"). I guess I'm just a moderate on the design-usability spectrum, but that's because I don't see it as a continuum. In fact, I have a secret little motto: "design is interaction". In general, I absolutely believe in usability testing, but I also think the always-make-your-links-blue usability strawman masks the fact that we haven't figured out how to do this stuff right yet, shielding us from the ugly truth that our excruciatingly thought-out interfaces are still hard to use. But I also think that's OK. Figuring out how to use a medium is damn difficult and it's gonna take some time. And I feel patient right now.

We have to learn how to speak in order to learn to sing, but there's no reason we can't be doing both at the same time.

Tangentially, I love her photographs and she has some excellent basic web design notes with lotsa annotated links.