Introduction

In the past year or so, a lot of thoughts about usability have been floating around my head. Since there aren't that many people in my physical proximity that I can discuss these with, I decided to write down some of them and put them online. I was originally planning to do this in the form of essays on my web site. However, I discovered that writing these essays kept throwing up new ideas that made them longer and longer, and less and less coherent. I therefore decided to publish shorter pieces here instead, each about a single thought.

I want to make this accessible to both technical and non-technical readers, so if you are technical, please bear with me when I explain some concepts in more detail than you need.

I am not great at writing, but I hope it will be enough to communicate what I'm thinking. I also think doing this should help me improve my writing. As Paul Graham puts it:

"Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated."