“The only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that it’s all learned.”

—attributed to Bruce Ediger

This past weekend, I shared some basic principles of usability at the 2009 MountainWest RubyConf in Salt Lake City. As this is a developer-focused conference, I team-presented with Rails developer extraordinaire Jason Edwards who then progressively added usability improvements to some sample Rails code. You can check it out here: Because we had only 30 minutes to present, we presented the highest level concepts pretty quickly. I’ll try to go into more detail in subsequent posts.