DevSource has started new video interview series called Great Minds in Development. This is not more podcasts featuring our friends in the .NET community chatting away, but interviews with some of the top thought leaders in the development world. The first video is online and featues a fantastic interview with Jakob Nielsen who is considered the top guru when it comes to web usability. (Think Alan Cooper for the web.) The interview is a palatable 8 minutes but is chock full of great advice and great ideas from Nielsen. And whoever edited this piece had a little fun when he pointed out the Victoria's Secret website as an example. There's a lot more eye candy in this video than you might expect going in.
Not only is Nielsen a very engaging person in the interview, he gave me a lot to think about and affirmed some of my own personal methods of usability testing. Earlier this week, we had a problem with a new employee at a client site who was repeatedly causing an error in an app that nobody had ever hit in the two years it has been in production. My solution was not to try to tell him "what to do and what not to do", but to remote into his computer and watch him work - to see what he did intinctively so that I could teach the program to be smart enough to work with that particular pattern. Listening to Neilsen, I was happy to hear that my own instincts on how to approach this problem fit in nicely with the methodologies of one of the most respected usability experts in the world.