I was still living in the UK in 2002 when Paul and I put the business plan together for our new venture - iPoint.
Coming from a corporate environment I was adamant to do my due diligence and so I made a special trip to Amsterdam to attend a kiosk exhibition. I hoped to gain some insight into how a touch screen kiosk business should be run, and what technologies were available. At the time - before smartphones - touch screen technology was very new. It was mainly used in the restaurant and point of sale industry. Although there was some off-the-shelf software available, it was extremely limited and not up to our requirements. The show turned out to be a big disappointment. There were only 12 exhibitors and I was out of there in about 30 minutes.
After the show, I had a lot of time on my hands before my return flight home. I wandered into a book store and by chance found a book called “Don't Make Me Think.” I spent the rest of the day sitting in a park, entirely immersed in my new book.
This book completely defined how we approached our software development in the months and years that followed.
It's based on best practice usability principles for websites and is well known to web designers. We found that much of it could be applied to a touch screen interface design. The information was simple and it made sense such as; a button must look like a button and the interface should tell the user that the button has been pressed. Simple, right? You would be surprised how often designers get this wrong.
Don't Make Me Think; became our design bible and we referred to it often in our initial design. It still governs our approach to interface design today. and even though it's been updated, much of the core principle of interface design still holds.
Today we track hundreds of thousands of successful store-finds each month across our network and this success is largely due to this brilliant book.
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