Comment by ghshephard
12 years ago
Rabino - I'm not sure what you are suggesting here. I'm trying to understand if you are commenting on Apple's well known philosophy of not engaging in any form of end-user design engagement, or whether you believe that a company of Apple's stature would absolutely engage in usability testing.
A lot (many? most?) of Apple's design decisions are made by designers who create the best product, based on a combination of their intuition, design sense, and overriding design principles.
Some application (Podcast App) - have clearly never seen any form of usability testing prior to release.
I've seen more than one poorly designed, poorly executed product go to market with lots of user testing. I'd love to have someone from Apple comment on their design process, because it's really just conjecture that they do or don't usability test their products, but I'm not holding my breath.
I called out the Podcast App because it was unusable by almost everyone who tried it after it shipped. I personally spent 45 minutes trying to graph out on paper the interactions between various channels/tuner, and mastering the finicky little switches on it, to no avail.
I cannot believe such an App had even a single "average" user attempt to use it - it had to have been entirely the product of one or two individuals operating in a vacuum.